omenti

stories and star support

Watching the latest Physicsgirl video made me think of a couple of things, but first take a look.

Combining her almost reckless enthusiasm with a serious work ethic, Dianna is my candidate for the best visual physics explainer around. It's one thing to describe something with high production videos or stories, but quite another to fun educational demos that actually work.  These days she has a couple of people working with her and perhaps a dozen physicists who volunteer suggestions, but these still take several weeks of hard work to get right.  Her brilliance is making them look easy while being clear.  Trust me - that's hard.

 

Some types of educational story telling are a team effort.

 

It made me think of my first chemistry class in college - the basic inorganic class most people take.  I was just sitting down in the large lecture room when we heard and felt a large bang coming from the front of the room.  A cloud of chalk dust rose from the slate black board and the right quarter of the board crashed to the floor. Dr Spicer, the chemistry prof, rushed towards an opening door to the left of the slate.  As it opened Jerry and a cloud of acrid smoke poured out.   Coughing, Jerry pointed to the exists.   Our dispatch wasn't exactly orderly.

 

Jerry was a lab tech and in charge of the department's demos.  He was preparing something for a pchem class when the explosion happened.  It convinced me that pchem must be interesting.  

 

Good demos are hard to get right.  A teacher usually isn't the right person to create one.  You need someone with the inclination and time to devote to what needs to be a memorable visual story that the professor can embellish with words and equations. Often you need a someone with serious maker skills. This is true for real experiments too.  

 

I learned my lesson a few years later teaching a lab section of a physics for premeds class.  Two of us co-taught  two sections with forty students each.  The lab was a third of their grade so they paid attention.  (I didn't realize it at the time, but having power over a grade in a competitive class gives the instructor an inflated opinion of their teaching skills as the students are overly attentive.)  We hauled out an old Van de Graff generator - something that must have been made in before WWII.   A big one can generate a formidable amount of static electricity. We had demonstrated how the charge was enough to burn a hole through a piece of cardboard. The other grad student had an insulated copper wire running from his finger tip, inside his shirt, down his pants and connected to the room's electrical ground.   Since the students were interested in medicine, we reasoned they'd see this as dangerous and pay attention and learn why grounding is important.

 

The generator was at maximum power as he approached the terminal.  What neither of us realized was his connection to ground had come off.  The spark jumped about twenty centimeters and knocked him over.  I realized what had happened and yelled in anyone knew CPR.  They thought it was a stunt and started applauding.  Fortunately he wasn't hurt badly.  The sparked burned him a bit, but mostly he was startled, causing him to fall over.  At least it was memorable.

 

Another path to is memorable storytelling.  Ideally it isn't a solo effort as the audience should be involved. That's what I aspire to these days, but I'm not very good at it.   The other day we were talking about patents when I remembered Feynman's patent story.  It was one of his favorites, so I checked to see if there was recording.  Note he has an audience.  My own experience is that this kind of story telling is much easier with an audience - for me a very small one. In an odd way it becomes a collaboration.

 

abigail van allen's layer cake - catalyst for the last half of the 20th century

I was in my second year of grad school and had gone to dinner at my advisor's house.  These dinners were always interesting and the deserts were a near match.  That night we had a wonderful homemade cake.  A layer cake rolled in the shape of a log, filled with fresh fruit and coated with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.  One of the guests - James Van Allen - yes the guy the Van Allen belts are named after - remarked on the cake and told us the story about Sputnik starting the space race was all wrong.  The real beginning came years earlier in his living room over his wife's excellent layer cake.  Reality is often more fascinating than the recent history we hear in school.

 

It was around 1953.  Van Allen and a group of physicists were at his home after a formal meeting.  This night a critical step was taken.  After talking about new learnings from balloon and sounding rocket explorations of the ionosphere.  Someone suggested maybe an Earth orbiting satellite would be possible soon.  After all - this von Braun guy was making a lot of noise about space travel being practical.

 

Indeed Wernher von Braun had been trying to popularize space travel.  He had teamed up with science fiction writers and later with Disney and Collier's trying to convince the public. Although von Braun was charismatic, he wasn't taken that seriously.  The only thing the government wanted him for was leading the Army's program to be rockets that could deliver nuclear weapons.

 

Enjoying the excellent cake was someone who could make a difference.  Lloyd Berkner was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  He had the ear of generals and even the President.  He made an interesting suggestion.  Maybe the way to learn more about near space would be a multination collaboration like one that explored Antarctica.   Given global tensions it could be useful for political reasons and would spread the costs. Larger sounding rockets could be built along with expeditions to the poles.  Maybe even a satellite.   Everyone at the dinner loved the idea and the International Geophysical Year was proposed soon afterwards.  Ultimately dozens of countries and hundreds of scientists were involved.  The target year would be 1957.

 

Van Allen and the other near space guys kept proposing satellites with no luck.  Then, a few years later, Berkner found the key.  President Eisenhower was focused on avoiding WWIII and countering the Soviets.  Something like a satellite for science was nothing but a distraction.  Berkner had used the "it will shock the other side" argument without luck.  Then he changed gears and suggested it could lead to spy satellites.

 

Eisenhower was a general.   Having great surveillance is deeply embedded in military DNA.  Spies on the ground, high altitude aircraft, code breakers .. whatever it took.  The only trick with a satellite, Berkner said, would be to establish Earth orbit as neutral territory.  A small scientific satellite could set a precedent.   Eisenhower agreed and the Navy ultimately won a competition to work on Project Vanguard - a satellite to be instrumented by Van Allen's team. 

 

The Soviet Union's ICBM project was led by a scientist more interested in space flight than ICBMs.  He realized an ICBM would make a dandy satellite launcher and when Khrushchev took power managed to convince him on an ICBM program and added an Earth orbiting satellite would have a great political impact.  Khrushchev agreed, but what he really wanted was a big ICBM.

 

Through the International Geophysical Year interactions it had become clear that the Soviets were building a satellite - indeed that it would launch in the Fall of 1957.  It seemed like a fantastic cap to the year, but the knowledge and excitement didn't go beyond far that group.

 

When Sputnik (fellow traveler) launched it was mostly ignored by the Americans - certainly the government.  The New York Times made a big announcement and people went out to look.  Satellite tracking became almost a hobby for some (that was the genesis for a global positioning system, but that's another story), but America wasn't quaking in fear.

 

The American government was happy - perhaps delighted.  They weren't first, but this little Soviet metal sphere orbited over American territory several times a day.  Precedent had been established. It would take time, but the Americans would get their spy satellites.

 

The story most of us know came from Texas.  Lyndon Banes Johnson worried whoever controlled space could control Earth - an old sci-fi trope.  LBJ also happened to be the Senate Majority Leader.  He gave impassioned speeches about falling behind.  His words resonated with the public and early American rocket failures only increased public anxiety.  

 

And what about Van Allen and the other scientists?  Johnson managed to open the serious money spigot.  It became clear that ICBMs made great satellite launchers with modest changes.  The scientific study of space was a dandy idea to help prove in new rocket technology.    STEM education in the public schools sprang up largely out of Berkeley and MIT.  The world was changing.

 

The Van Allen Belts?  They were discovered using the early Explorer series of satellites in 1958.  The interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind was beginning to sort out. 

 

So that's the secret .. really good layer cake.

 

the danger of over simplification

In the early 1990s Anders Ericsson of Florida State University went to a music school in Berlin to test an idea about deliberate practice.  The music school had high standards.  Ericsson suspected practice separated the best of the best from the average.  He asked the eighteen year old violin students to think back on how much practicing they did since they took up the instrument.  Then he had the music professors to divide them into three groups - great, good and average.  Those in the great group averaged about 10,000 hours of practice.  The good, about 8,000 and the average practiced around 5,000 hours.  It seemed like a neat result - practice more and you do better.  He published a paper that wasn't exactly rigorous - it lacked statistical measures like ranges and standard deviations and was more of a discussion than a formal paper.  

 

Prof. Ericsson didn't push the result was a bit to the side of his core work and he didn't heavily promote the result.  But others saw a compelling story around that lovely round hour and a work ethic.   One was Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he often oversimplifies and gets things wrong.  The 10,000 hour result has been disproven by more careful studies over and over, but his books and TED talks are enormously popular and have made the idea something of a cultural meme.  

 

Recently I was thinking about something else he said that was misleading. Great storytelling, but misleading.  The more I thought about it, the more damaging it seemed.  It's partly linked to the 10,000 hour story and some unhealthy forms of training. 

 

In Outliers Gladwell talks about a relative age effect.  He uses sports, but it can apply to academics and other areas.  Say the calendar allowing kids to participate in a sport begins on January 1.  Kids born in the first quarter would be  January → March birthdays.  He noticed that ice hockey players born in the first quarter are over-represented and forth quarter kids are  under-represented.  The pattern appeared in several other sports so he set about writing a compelling sounding story.

 

What happens is when  kids are allowed to try out for a sport - say nine or ten years old - many of the first quarter kids are significantly more developed than forth quarter kids.  Most coaches can't tell the difference between maturity and ability and tend to select the kids who perform the task better.  The rate of change at that age is so great that the majority selected will be the older kids. 

 

A problem is the better players get moved to the better coaches and facilities. The talented ones in the chosen pack progress riding a premium training infrastructure.  There may be very talented kids who are later born who miss the advantages of this training and infrastructure who are lost to the system as they miss a chance to develop and are soon left far behind.

 

Combine this with the 10,000 target (as an exercise figure out how many hours a day you need between the age of nine and seventeen to become expert) and you realize specialization needs come early for the better athletes. I'll admit to oversimplification here - this is a fascinating area that has become something of an arms race as, at least in the US, the goal of a college scholarships can force specialization before a kid becomes a teenager.

 

The funny thing is when you look at more carefully you see sixty to seventy percent of the college age players in many sports are first quarter births, but for professional athletes in the same sports the relative age effect almost goes away.  Almost as at the very elite level there's a slight over abundance of third and forth quarter athletes. What appears to be going on is there's a great weeding of talent from college to pro. In many sports late bloomers - kids who got their growth spurt late for example - finally reached parity, but the fact that they had to work harder and learn the sport better ultimately made them better athletes.

 

There are other complexities I won't go into other than mentioning playing a variety of sports rather than concentrating tends to make better elite athletes.  We have a bias when we hear about prodigies like Tiger Woods and tend to assume they're the norm, but it's not. We also tend to forget about the prodigies that never make it.  One estimate is that only about one percent of sports prodigies identified by the media (written up in a magazine) by the time they're teenagers ever make it into the pros.  

 

So the American and some other systems do manage to train a number of elite athletes in many sports and show it internationally in the Olympics.  What about the potentially elite athletes that were never trained?   It turns out some systems cast a much wider net.  The Nordics, notably Norway, push universal recreation and sport for kids as a healthy way to provide fun and lower healthcare costs. Early specialization is discouraged and good facilities are made available to all.   It appears to work very well.

 

I'm far from athletic and am not recommending changing any system (although I think Norway's goal of a healthy population is excellent).  This is an illustration.  Similar issues of pipelining kids exist in music, art and academics.  Broadly speaking STEM education is an example of exclusion and producing a population that isn't as literate as it could be.

 

Back to the storytellers and  oversimplification.  If something isn't important and you just want to get a tough idea across, it might be appropriate, but anything of importance needs an appropriate level of depth. That places serious demands on the author, teacher - anyone trying to communicate.   It's something I struggle with a lot. 

 

 

 

moonshine

"Land sakes"

 

A hot Sunday afternoon almost exactly fifty years ago.  My sister and I were on the couch next to my Grandma King.  Walter Cronkite was out connection to the small spacecraft as it slipped towards touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility.  I was just a kid, but I knew this might be one of the most dramatic moments I'd witness.  About then she said those two words and I had another realization.

 

Spacings between the generations on my mother's side were large.  I never met my Grandfather - he died working as a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone System in Utah, Idaho and Montana years before I was born.  He was born a few weeks before Custer's Last Stand.  Grandma was born in 1889 in the Territorial Utah theocracy.  She would tell stories of the first motor car she saw, of a Butch Cassidy-like thug who ran a small business protection racket, when she read about the Wright Brothers a few years after they flew, and why moving pictures were awful (the batteries emitted a stink).  They didn't have indoor plumbing until 1940, but the big event was getting electricity around 1930 .. bigger than indoor plumbing, bigger than their Ford.  We couldn't get her on an airplane.  Airfares from Great Falls to Salt Lake City were cheaper than riding the dog, but she heard about crashes for much of her adult life .. in fact real air safety didn't begin until the mid fifties, so she wasn't that far off. 

 

And here she was watching glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, listening to a human voices coming from thousands of miles away along with two that had traveled by radio requiring about one and a quarter seconds to find antennas on Earth..

 

What happened in the next few minute was breathtaking, but I found myself wondering if her life spanned greater fundamental change than any other time in history.  Would she see more fundamental change than I would?   You start thinking about what fundamental means,.  It still keeps me up at night.

 

Now there is talk about going back - sending people to the Moon and to Mars.  I'm afraid I don't see it as a big deal and consider it wasteful.

 

Others have articulated what Apollo did for America and the world.  So much was spent - nearly 4.5% of the federal budget was NASA in the mid 60s - that technologies advanced at a much more rapid pace than we'd normally see.   The computer and semiconductor industries were jumpstarted.   Secondary school science education changed and a large STEM pipeline to Universities was created.¹ There was a morale boost for a few years, but it faded against an awful war and dramatic social change on several fronts.  A moon landing, iconic as it was, faded to insignificance in a few years.  The last three Apollo missions were cancelled largely because the public lost interest and politicians responded. 

 

I'm a big proponent of space exploration and the unmanned space program has been brilliant.  Putting people into space is not only expensive, but probably wrong biologically.  We didn't evolve to live in such harsh environments.  Most of the people who have flown in space have orbited in a region where the Earth's magnetic field shields them (and us!) from radiation.   Without Earth's magnetic field it is unlikely life could have evoled on the surface or in shallow water.  Anyone who stays on the Moon or Mars will have to live underground or in elaborate radiation shields.  There are issues of water, air, food, human psychology, low gravity muscle and bone degradation and so on.   We're the wrong tool for the job.

 

People, life support systems and rockets didn't scale by Moore's Law, but computation has.  What a non-human kilogram in space or on another body in the Solar System can do has made leaps opening and now we have commercial businesses exploiting near Earth orbit and students orbiting satellites.  We can build increasingly intelligent probes that are space faring.  Plucky (I've wanted to use that word) robot explorers  are getting better and better and do almost all of the meaningful exploration of the Solar System.  We're really good at building and flying them as well as analyzing and wondering about what they tell us.  

 

There are those who sayt we have to leave Earth - that it's our destiny and we've ruined the Earth.  That strikes me as defeatist and driven by more by science fiction than logic and science.  A failure of the imagination.   Another explanation is adventure.  Adventure is fine, but you can't call it real exploration at this point.   My vote is for learning about the Solar System and beyond in a cost effective way as we work on repairing the damage we've done here.  

 

We can always look up and admire the Woman in the Moon.

 

 

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Grandma King swore in Irish Gaelic.  Sadly I never learned.

__________

¹ I've written quite a bit about the good and bad of the approach.  Arguably it's created an over-supply of scientists at the cost of ignoring and even alienating the majority of students. It's sad it hasn't changed much since.

finding a voice

On those clear and moonless nights stars would suddenly rise from the edge of the butte marking its shape and size.  Besides the stars the only other lights were a distant aircraft beacon and a flashlight modified to give off a faint red light to protect your night vision and to look around for sleeping cows.   Montana is this magical place.

 

There were three places Brian and I would haul our little telescopes. North of town near Benton Lake on the Bootlegger Trail.  East of town there was a  turnoff near the O'Day farm on the way to the Highwoods,.  And to the West was a little farm near the butte just South of Fort Shaw.  Mary was the owner of the last place and a family friend.  She had two conditions.  First you had  to be careful at the gate to make sure her cows didn't get out and second was was letting her look through the telescopes and sharing stories about the stars. 

 

Her stories were more interesting. They came some an elderly Assiniboine man she knew when she worked as a public health nurse at the Fort Belknap Reservation. It seems wrong I can't remember his name.    His people had named constellations to orient themselves at night, but they weren't those I knew.  The idea that someone could look at Orion or the Big Dipper and not see those shapes was delicious.  One night she casually mentioned there were "medicine wheels"  - astronomical calculators of sorts to track cosmic cycles - equinoxes, solstices, planetary motions and sacred days.  North American Stonehenges.  It shouldn't have surprised me. There is order and regularity in the sky.  There are people who observe and try to make order. It is only natural to make clocks and calendars.

 

We're funny about time.  We build instruments to measure it, but our senses can't dealt with very short or long periods.   It flies when we're having fun and drags when we're not.  A bit over a hundred years ago we learned that it doesn't exist by itself, but it is part of something deeper called space-time. At the deepest level it's still a mystery  What we do know is Universe is always changing.  As people we look backwards and forwards. We wonder what will happen - where we've been and where we might be going.  

 

Science is a tool for sorting out things that happen in Nature - and this is one of my frustrations. For two decades we've known that human activity is responsible for the increase in global temperature and increasing accurate forecasts have been made since.  We even know steps we can take to reduce the impact of the problem.  This is settled science with better confidence levels than almost anything in - say - medicine. But there's this problem. How do you get people to take action?

 

Scientists are generally poor public communicators and the basic story of global warming isn't exactly a riveting story with a feel good ending.  There's guilt with blame to go around and the problems are mostly cast as something future generations will bear.  Furthermore people in wealthy countries will be able to afford to minimize the problems it causes locally.  It's easy to forget, Even if it wasn't politically contested, it's not on the top ten list of many who want to take action.  

 

I've been thinking a lot about the role of the scientist as a communicator.  There's a tendency to feel like you need to provide a full story even though the subject is complex and no single person is up to the task.  It's different when you go to the doctor.  Your primary care physician lacks specific knowledge but that isn't seen as a problem.  She can refer you to a specialist.  A generalist's high level knowledge and connections to more complex understandings happen to be one of her specialities.  There are questions that you can ask both a medical doctor and a scientist and learn something deep.  A few years ago I was on the train with a heart surgeon.  I asked him what he thought about mortality - his own as well as his patients.  It sparked a conversation that was fascinating for both of us.  The train stopped at Penn Station and we spent the next hour at a coffee shop talking. His answers were undoubtely unique to him. They were his stories that motivated him and his telling made an impact on me. 

 

People seem to be wired for story telling. They sometimes go deep - even to our identity.

 

Maybe this is a way forward.  Michelle Alexander offered an interesting thought experiment - what if reincarnation existed and we came back to live in a world we helped make?  If it was random chances are we'd be poor living somewhere that wouldn't be able to respond to the problems like a wealthy nation.  Thinking along these lines may be an exercise in empathy.  You could ask questions about other religious traditions - say those that ask people to be stewards of the Earth.  There may be conversations lurking that could help people find common ground.

 

Conventional storytelling doesn't have  many storylines.  Think of the Lord of the Rings - a heroic effort to save the Earth against seemingly impossible odds.  Are there ways to create stories that might lead to deeper thought?  These are much more natural channels to a person's heart than a PowerPoint presentation.  I've made a few attempts, but I'm not a good at this sort of thing.  I'm open to ideas and some of you might be brilliant.  

 

A really neat idea is the global warming fairy tale. Fairy tales can be short, but powerful approximations for larger ideas. Kate Marvel is a climate scientist who has taken that path.  Give her  Slaying the Climate Dragon fairy tale a spin - it fits on a single page and touches many ideas.

_______

 

The call came about fifteen years ago.  It was Mary's family.  She had left a note asking for a favor.  She wondered if monuments could be placed on their property to mark the dates she came to the world and left it as well as noting the rise of Sirius and the Peliedes .. two of her favorite objects...  as well as the seasons.  She also wanted to know where North would be at one of periods H.G. Wells described in The Time Machine.

 

Designing a medicine wheel is a learning experience.  How accurate should it be?  How long should it be valid?  The Earth's axis wobbles and precesses.  Our orbit varies a bit year to year.  The ground moves.  There is constant change .. often too slow for us to notice, but the Earth - Nature - is always moving on.  It filled me with optimism thinking about those that will follow.

 

communication

 

It's almost Christmas and the candles are coming out.

 

Candles.    And Michael Faraday's remarkable gift to young people.  He's way up on my own list of favorite scientists.  In addition to making fundamental contributions to physics (like field theory even though he was poorly schooled in math), he happened to be an excellent public speaker.  Every year there would be Christmas lectures for children.  A legendary set of six lectures on the chemistry and physics of candle flames was given in 1848. While a good deal of deeper understanding has taken place, much of the lecture is still relevant.  Watch a modern performance!¹  Here's a Project Gutenberg link to the text.

 

My advisor believed his students should be able to describe their Ph.D.thesis work to a group of smart high school students.  That proved to be one of the most difficult and poorly received talks I've given.  (I've improved over the years:-)  This sort of challenge is becoming more common ..  Alan Alda's Flame Challenge is wonderful..  A question is presented every year and people attempt to explain it to groups of eleven year old students from around the world who then select a winner.    There is the five level challenge..  try explain your work to a grade school, high school, undergrad, and graduate students along with having a meaningful chat with another expert in the field.  My favorite is Neville Sanjana talking about CRISPR.  I think Faraday would have been thrilled.

And finally there's the Dance your Ph.D. competition open to STEM Ph.D.s...  This year's winner was Nancy Scherich with a focus on braid theory - a brach of topology that looks at knots in higher dimensional spaces.  Hula hoops, linear algebra and murder! 

I'm a terrible dancer, but I guess something could have been done with infrared freedom and ultraviolet slavery and the production of charm quarks...  Then again...

 

Now a few questions:

 

How important is it to communicate the beauty of what you are interested in to non-specialists?  How is it usually done and how would you improve it?  And how do you spark and sustain an interest in some?  

 

By the way.  The Christmas Lectures have continued to this day.

 

Lessons and Carols

 

And a late (10^th of December) addition

Music

 

I think songs would be great for science communication.  Although They Might Be Giants have a few good ones, pickings are sparse.  Sadly most scientists are not good singer songwriters and coming up with lyrics that communicate real science is not easy.  

 

There are exceptions.  Henry Reich put some nice lyrics to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star that are sound and current.  They work across ages and levels of astronomy experience.  The first time I heard it I thought I found something wrong, but another listen and some physics told me it was ok.²

 

twinkle twinkle little star
you look small cause you are far
lightyears out from here to there
your light is distorted by the air
so you twinkle twinkle little star
adaptive optics shows you as you are

twinkle twinkle little star
you must be a small pulsar
out away from earth you drift
this is known from you red shift
twinkle twinkle spinning star
degenerate neutrons are what you are

twinkle twinkle little star
supernova, au revoir
you got so big to big perhaps
electron capture core collapse
twinkle twinkle former star
a black holes all you now are

twinkle twinkle little star
wait actually no you’re a meteor
breaking up in the atmosphere
i wish id known you’d end up here
twinkle twinkle shooting star
became a meteorite that hit my car

 

Maybe it is enough to get people thinking and asking questions.    So in addition to dance your Ph.D., I'd love to see a sing your Ph.D. - or just sing your research.   Collaboration with a real singer is ok... witness this version of Howie Day's Collide sung by... Howie Day. The physics is quite up to date - get in touch if you want anything decoded.

 

Just don't get me started on the Big Bang Theory show...

__________

¹  The Faraday Candle Lectures

Introduction to Michael Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candle

Lecture One: A Candle: Sources of its Flame 

Lecture Two: Brightness of the Flame

Lecture Three: Products of Combustion

Lecture Four: The Nature of the Atmosphere

Lecture Five: Respiration & its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle

 

They've also produced a version with commentary if you want more after watching the remade lecture

Lecture One: A Candle: Sources of its Flame (Commentary version)

Lecture Two: Brightness of the Flame (Commentary version)

Lecture Three: Products of Combustion (Commentary version) 

Lecture Four: The Nature of the Atmosphere (Commentary version) 

Lecture Five: Respiration & its Analogy to the Burning of a Candle (Commentary version) 

 

²  Using redshift only works for distant galaxies and pulsars are observed in our galaxy (they're in other galaxies, but are too faint to measure a redshift, let alone detect).  Re-reading 

you must be a small pulsar
out away from earth you drift
this is known from you red shift

It is becomes clear that it is drifting away and we know that by it's redshift..  so the song is correct.  

it's stories all the way down

The phone rang on Sunday afternoon...

 

"Hi, Steve?  Syd has a question..."

(Syd is about ten)

"Hi Steve.  Why is the sky blue?"

 

She probably has heard a few explanations - most of us have over the years.  In fact the common explanation you are shown in high school and college isn't very good. We set up an iChat link for the sketches and facial expressions.  Words and sketches appeared that were a bit richer than the standard explanation.  No equations, but there was enough to branch off into color perception, colors that exist only in your mind, why the Sun looks yellowish and some experiments to try and so on until my battery was down to about ten percent. Her parents are probably annoyed.

 

We tend to describe reality as layers of stories.  Take your smartphone.  You push regions on it's screen and things happen.   A video chat with a dear friend thousands of miles away, a map, photos from Iceland, music from a huge library or directly from a concert, someone's heartbeat.  All of us know how to make these things happen - the incantations we make with our fingers and voices to interact with a real and virtual world.  But that's just one layer.

 

Far below is the fundamental physics of the atoms the phone is made of.  Quantum field theory provides a rich description of the subatomic particles and fields and we have general relativity to describe how it's mass interacts with spacetime and visa versa..  A story I know well - perhaps better than how to use my iPhone, but it's pretty useless when I'm trying to find directions on a map.

 

There are many layers in between.  The story of materials - metals, semiconductors, plastics, battery chemistries .. the things that make the physical device.  A bit deeper is how semiconductors work .. a bit above is how electrical circuits work.  And then there's the rich layer where artificial language meets circuitry - the programming of the device.  This story is told in code at a variety of levels.  I know some of these stories well and can use them creatively and author in their language.  And above it all are human interactions - an area we all know a bit about. There are many layers where I'm clueless.  That's probably true of most of us, but I've noticed telling stories at one level while thinking about another can lead to new ideas.    

 

It is quite possible to deeply understand how to use an iPhone or Android phone and think the Earth is flat and riding on elephants on the back of huge turtles.  In a rich real world each of these layers must be locally valid and the layers must be constant with each other.  Fake science -  global warming denial, anti-vaxing, homeopathy and so on are modern versions of the flat earth.

 

Most of these layers have incomplete stories - works in progress.  Our understanding needs improvement and that is wonderful.   As an aside it is remarkable that the lowest layer .. basic physics .. turns out to be completely understood in the part of the Universe humans inhabit.¹

 

The poet said the world is made of stories..  At least the real world can be described by them.  It makes me think of the upcoming scientist's march on Washington.  I'm torn about attending.  It probably won't have much impact and will be ridiculed an misreported by the those who need to hear it's message.  At the same time science is incredibly import to society - more now than ever in the past - and it's under direct attack.  Unfortunately scientists are mostly lousy story tellers ..  I know I am.  Scientists live in a world of coded jargon.  We don't take the time to talk about the astonishing surprise and beauty of Nature often enough.  

 

I have serious shortcomings as a storyteller. Writers, musicians, poets, artists, actors and athletes are much better.  I'm trying to get better and think it is important for more people to develop skills.  Some of them are showing real promise.   Alan Alda set up an excellent program at Stony Brook that is slowly spreading.  A bit of hope.

 

a line I offered to Syd  

 

The sky is mostly transparent and colorless, but it happens to be the stage on which the colors dance... 

 

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¹ We know this to a very high confidence level .. much deeper than in most of science.  You can even write down an expression for it ...  here's a very compact dense form.  Some call it Core Theory .. basically it's just the Standard Model with General Relativity nailed on.  You can imagine places and situations where it breaks down .. in some collisions in particle accelerators and in some of the most violent events in the Universe.  Then you need to unify gravity and quantum mechanics and more,  but we don't directly interact with them as humans.  This is probably one of the deepest advances in science and it really has only come together with a high degree of certainty in the past decade.

Just because we know what the interactions are and how they work, the details of real world problems can make them too difficult to calculate. We just know, to an astonishing level of confidence, there isn't anything other type of interaction that impacts our world.

(this may look like gibberish, but it describes the physics that we experience on Earth and most of the Universe.    Not often seen on tshirts outside the boundaries of Caltech, but one of the great intellectual achievements.  It is a capstone on a small corner of understanding Nature, but it just marks a beginning.)

 

 

getting over wack-a-mole

This past Monday Randall Munroe posted a beautifully done timeline of the Earth's average temperature since the last glaciation on xkcd.   It's beautifully crafted, but...  

scroll down and enjoy and I'll pick up on the other side..

 

 

I first became aware of global warming in the mid 80s.  Back then I was interested in the climatic impact of limited to mid-sized nuclear exchanges.  Many physicists were pushing for large stockpile reductions when Star Wars was taken up by Ronald Reagan.  Computation had advanced to the point where non-trivial climate models were possible.  Some folks at NASA and elsewhere started using them to study human caused - anthropomorphic - global warming with James Hansen testifying before Congress in 1987.  I started following it, but the science wasn't well settled in my mind for another decade.  By 2000 it was becoming very clear the effect was real and more alarming than Hansen had predicted.   For me it had become one of two preventable existential level threats.  I had to do something.  

 

Talking to people and looking at television, newspapers and magazines I saw the subject was very muddled with some organizations pumping out misinformation.  Most of the energy we command comes from fossil fuels and their combustion was the major source of the greenhouse gases that were tipping the scale.  Physicists are heavily focused on energy so I thought a clear soup to nuts discussion of energy on a non-technical level would be valuable.  I had a chance to give a serious of talks to some non-technical audiences and found a good deal of interest...  the talks would run an hour, but the Q&A sessions were longer.  I looked around for good books and found anything useful to be too technical for most readers.  That started me on a book project in my spare time.

 

There were problems I didn't recognize at the time.  I like to think that I can drill deeply into a problem and understand it deeply enough to gain a bit of insight.  Of course that isn't always true.  I had assumed that education was a useful path and that the focus should be on energy.  Both were mistakes caused by a poor understanding of the problem.  And so my education began...

 

I wasted a lot of time and that of a friend who was helping as the concerned non-technical person.  Writing to the right level and covering the right ground wasn't working with painful rewrites combined a sense of failure  At the same time the talks were well received and the Q&As were becoming learning experiences for me.  I was building toward an epiphany.  

 

During the session following a talk before a few hundred animators in Burbank someone identified himself as Blackfoot .. a fellow Montanan.  I had been talking about climate cycles with very long periods ..  explanations for ice ages and the like.  a medicine wheel ...  he went on to explain that the tradition he was from believed in cycles of many things dictated by the turning of medicine wheels and how he was struck by the similarity of what I was saying.  We had very different explanations for something in Nature.  Mine was empirical - his not, but the impact through our eyes was similar.  We were talking about something that might be a source of friction if approached as I would be tempted... but this was a breakthrough for me - a reason for conversation.

 

I watched as he talked...  several hundred people - people who tell stories - giving him full attention for ten minutes.  We are indeed narravores.  He finished and I decided to kill the rest of my talk...  They were the story tellers and should have been teaching me.  I told them I probably couldn't make a difference, but maybe they could.  They were the reason why I was a vegetarian.. not a bad trick considering where I was from.   They made Bambi and that raised some questions that changed my worldview.  

 

What followed was a real education into the social problem of global warming.   I still have a deep interest in the science and technology component but I'm not a technosolutionist.  I could talk for days on the subject now, but just a few points.  

 

Shortly after this I came across an interesting piece of work out of Yale - the Six Americas Project.¹ The population is segmented into six groups based on their level of global warming concern:  the alarmed, the concerned, the cautious, the unconcerned, the doubtful and the dismissive.  The alarmed believe this is of fundamental importance, but none of the other groups would raise it to a level demanding immediate attention.  Furthermore the doubtful and dismissive are so fixated in disbelief that the presentation of fact only hardens their view.  The hardening is largely independent of their education level.  Similar work has been done for many other areas.  It is not a liberal vs conservative thing, although conservatives tend to be doubters and dismissive as their party has hitched its fortune to burning fossil fuels.  Some liberals  take evidence conflicting positions in areas like vaccinations and GMO safety..  Of course these unscientific positions are distributions.

 

I'm naturally disturbed by the amount of global warming disinformation and it is in my nature to debunk it.  Unfortunately this turns into a game of whack-a-mole.  You can spend a lot of time debunking, but the doubtfuls and dismissives don't buy what you've said and through up several new bits of pseudo-science.  It is a losing game I've wasted too much time on.  It turns out the concerned group is the largest single segment of the population.  Combined with the alarmed it is now a slight majority.  A better use of time is to ignore the doubters and focus on the concerned.  

 

Another epiphany came from a conversation with a businessman from Texas.  Early on I could tell I had to hold my cards closely - he was ranting on the nanny state and know-nothing scientists and their atheist ways continuing on to racist comments about our President.  But he was focused on wind energy and power transmission.  He had been in the business of connecting bits of the electric grid to bring the economy of scale to parts of Texas and Oklahoma .. at first with coal fired plants.  Now he was into wind turbines and was ecstatic about the potential money to be had in transmission and interconnection.  He told me he was doing eight figure a year business with a staff of ten.  Both of us want to see more efficient power transmission and the connection of alternate energy sources like wind and solar.  Our positions on global warming are diametrically opposed, but both approaches lower carbon emissions.  I could only wish him great success.

 

Finally one needs hope.  A good deal of warming is baked into the next several decades and that is and will be a disaster. It would have been nice if we had taken serious steps twenty years ago.  Mitigation is much less expensive than adaptation.  While it is still important to  make dramatic carbon emission cuts rather than just throwing in the towel, some brilliant approaches to adaptation are emerging.  I'm running out of time, but carefully controlled underbrush and new growth burns can lead to greater carbon sequestration and much better water control.  This is beginning to work in parts of the West.

 

So much more around storytelling and empathy ..  Alan Alda's empathy approach using tools of story telling and the theater vs the NSF's sound-biteable news releases ...  guess which one I like?

 

I'm beginning so see more of the problem now. Several new questions have emerged and dealing with them brings great intellectual satisfaction.  Hopefully there will be a modest contribution to a solution, but the experience reminds me of the importance of deeply understanding a problem.  Sometimes the only way to see a larger picture is to make a serious of mistakes as you forge ahead with your early ideas even though they're wrong.

 

And Randall's beautiful graphic?  It is just a sermon, a rather lovely sermon, to the converted...  And for those who can trust the nearly universal consensus result of researchers this graphic put together by NASA is good.

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¹ A good deal of research has been published by the Yale group as well as a few other organizations.  A nice high level overview is Global Warmings 'Six Americas' (pdf)

the black hole that terrorized a city

Someone asked if I liked to watch horror/scifi movies.  It depends...

 

A few years ago I was trapped on a cross country flight and saw The Black Hole - one of those scripts that is so bad it is almost, but not quite, worth watching.  Check out the trailer...

 

Most special effects and animated movies take liberties with physics.  Starting with Disney many of the classic animation films created increasingly more interesting variations on physics to improve the storytelling physical worlds.  There were any number of tricks to trick the viewer to better immerse them in the story.¹

 

Special effects tend to suffer.  I'm able to enjoy films like Guardians of the Galaxy, but poor scripts and acting break the story telling and I find myself spending most of my time thinking about the physics.  

 

With that a mini-analysis of The Black Hole - (no plot is spoiled as I didn't notice one)

 

Somehow an there is an accident in a secret physics lab a hundred feet below St Louis.  Physicists have managed to create a tiny black hole that escapes and trolls around under the city coming up for buildings like the great white shark in Jaws.   At this point I'm completely out of story space and am thinking about small black holes.

 

Hmmm... about 30 meters underground and buildings on the surface are collapsing.  I'll make the assumption it is a miniature classical black hole, more on that later, and suggest that the gravitational force from it at the surface is about ten times Earth's gravity - that should be enough to flatten a building.  I could have picked other numbers, but we're just doing a little thought experiment and don't need to accurately understand how strong buildings are.  With this you can work out its mass - roughly about twenty trillionths the mass of the Earth - a bit over 100 trillion kilograms.  Now we're getting into interesting territory..

 

The event horizon of a black hole that mass is roughly a tenth of a trillionth of a meter -  about ten thousand times smaller than a hydrogen atom.²  Put it on the ground and it won't feel any resistance to any material on or in the Earth.  As soon as its created it will fall toward the center of the Earth picking up speed as it goes.  It whizzes through the center at about eight kilometers a second and starts slowing down as it heads towards a point, judging from my globe, on the surface of the Indian Ocean well off the Australian coast. Maybe it dines on a fish before reversing direction and heading back about 42 minutes later.³  Back and forth, back and forth - we have an odd sort of clock.

 

Games like this turn out to be a central part of play in physics.  You make a non-physical assumption -  assume a miniature black hole is created just under St Louis - and follow what happens using established physics.  In the process you can quickly deal with many questions and decide on those that are the best candidates for serious study.  Now that we have our black hole tic-tocking between St Louis and the Indian Ocean, let's look at smaller black holes.

 

I mentioned this was a classical black hole.  In 1974 Stephen Hawking proposed black holes can evaporate. The time required for one formed from a collapsed star is extremely long - it would take about 10⁶⁷ years for one with our Sun's mass ... approximately forever when you consider the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.  But the rate of evaporation has a strong dependence on the black hole's mass and lighter black holes evaporate faster.   The little St Louis black hole would last about a hundred times longer than the current age of the Universe.

 

Smaller black holes can have lifetimes small even on time scales we're used to.  One with the same mass as a small car - about 1,000 kg - would evaporate in a billionth of a second and would be about 200 times as bright as the Sun.  These super tiny black holes would make a very powerful and completely impractical doomsday devices - even more impractical than antimatter.  In other words the perfect plot device for a movie.

 

I'll end with a problem for those who like to work things out.  Send mail if you'd like hints.

 

The Master from Dr Who or a slightly annoyed Vogon captain approaches the Earth with a super slicer beam that instantly makes a cut through the Earth.  What happens if the cut is through the equator and is  one centimeter wide?  What happens with a one meter cut?  How about ten meters?   Now work the problem with the same three cuts, but this time slicing from pole to pole.  How does humanity make out in each scenario?  

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¹ If you have the slightest interest in animation The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Olie Johnson and Frank Thomas is just wonderful.  Go for the hard cover and treasure it.  Disney did amazing groundbreaking work, and other expanded wrote new rules.   Chuck Jones created an animation for roadrunners and coyotes that is an art form.  Even today the tricksters are still at it.

² the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass r_s = 2GM/c².  The point is it only goes linearly with mass while the mass of a star goes as the cube of the radius - the event horizon get small very quickly as mass drops.  The Sun has an event horizon of about 3 kilometers ... far too small to contain it.  r_s for the Earth is 0.9 centimeters.  

³ 42 minutes through a frictionless tunnel is the result everyone calculates in physics 101, but that assumes the Earth's interior has a uniform density.  Recent work giving a better understanding of the Earth's density distribution cuts a few minutes off the transit time.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I grilled some asparagus and used a homemade olive based dressing.  Ideally the trick would be to layer pieces of tomato on a bed of the grilled asparagus before adding the dressing, but it isn't good tomato season (yet).  Here's the dressing...

 

Olive dressing

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 tbl finely chopped kalamata olives

° 3 tbl extra virgin olive oil - a good one pays off

° 3 tbl red wine vinegar

° 3 tbl crumbled feta (leave off if you want it to be vegan)

° 2 tbl finely chopped red onion

° 1 clove garlic - very finely chopped or grated

° 1 tbl honey

° 1 tbl dijon mustard

° 1 tsp oregano

° salt and pepper to taste

 

 

Technique:-)

 

° mix the ingredients

 

all mixed up

With their wonderful noses, how does the world appear to a dog? Does a bat's echolocation augment their vision or does it create a separate model of their world?  Does your perception of reality differ from mine?

 

Brookhaven National Labs was a large enough reserve that it had its own wildlife. Deer, raccoons, weasels, owls ... even a family of beavers that descended from zoo escapees decades before.  In the Summer I'd take a break at dusk to watch the show that would develop in the formal garden the particle physics building wrapped around.  A bright light attracted insects which, in turn, brought in up to a dozen little brown bats.  They were using sound and vision, but their echolocation calls were far removed from my hearing.  You could try to characterize how good their echolocation must be but, as I learned after talking to a few experts, too many of the important parameters were unknown at the time.  

 

We may feel we have a good sense of what the world must look like, but our senses only sample small bits of reality. We live slightly in the past.  Our perception of the present - our sense of 'now' - is a window about three seconds long.  Our eyes send signals that are very different from images to the brain where a three dimensional model is created.  Some of that visual information is averaged over periods as long as fifteen seconds to make our model appear smooth.  We build three dimensional models of our surroundings with acoustic signals, but vision is a dominant sense so we usually don't 'see' that model as a solid reality. A dog's world would be very different as smell is a major sense for them.

 

We can easily be fooled by our senses, but mostly we're good enough at model building to survive and find great richness in the world that surrounds us.  We can get into trouble assessing abstract risk as we're wired with some rather strong model and survival biases.  Proper risk assessment often demands analysis and that turns out to be problematic  - but another subject.  

 

We extend our senses and build microscopes and telescopes and shift the signal to something we can grok.  We record nature at great resolution over short periods or over long periods and adjust the data so we can understand it.  We've created a tool called science that creates objectivity over the long term.  This tool building has extended our senses and we're beginning to integrate these extensions making us something different.

 

Places like Brookhaven are dedicated to moving the frontiers of our perceptions.  Physicists have a odd method to build microscopes to see the very small.  The trick is to slam objects together and sift through the fantastically small and the collisions play out over periods of time that can be more than fifteen orders of magnitude removed from the world we normally perceive.    When you study them they seem very real.  You develop a useful visualization that allows play and new questions.  

 

Paul would do quantum electrodynamic and chromodynamic calculation with his fingertips.  Feynman diagrams were a beautiful shorthand for thinking about the collisions of particle physics.  They are very visual, but Paul's sense of vision and touch were mixed. He could feel what they looked like and he would stare  into space doing his back of the envelope calculations - calculations that would normally create clouds of chalk dust around a blackboard - with his exquisite sense of touch.  Of course we didn't think anything about it.  

 

I had never heard about synesthesia.   It sounded crazy - people that had crossed senses.  A neurologist and his students came out from Columbia with a hypothesis that this synesthesia was common in physicists and mathematicians.   They explained some people would see certain letters or numbers in color, someone might taste a musical note, ... someone might mix sound and vision.  You could imagine crossing any pair of senses and perhaps even more. 

 

About fifty of us were tested.  Paul had a synesthesia that mixed touch and vision. Several people saw letters and numbers in colors.  I turn out to have a form of chromosynesthia - sounds get mixed with colors.  It never occurred to me that my perception of nature might be different from someone else's, but parts of my vision and sound are mixed - I build a world model that is an admixture of the two rather than one with crisp distinctions.  I kept quiet about it for years - it wasn't well accepted at the time and people would treat me as if I was crazy and/or ask questions that I couldn't answer.   

 

There are many types of synesthesia.  There is some evidence that we're born with a lot of this sort of wiring, but a great pruning takes place in the first few months that leaves us with orthogonal senses.  One can imagine evolutionary reasons for this.  The type of synesthesia I have is rare, but almost unknown in very coordinated people.  Other synesthesias would have been undetectable until writing was invented.  It may result from a problem during the great neural pruning in a baby's brain, but it may be so harmless that it isn't weeded out by selection.¹

 

I know one person, a composer, who can taste sound and another who can feel sight.  There are subcategories and some are - well - remarkable.  This morning I caught the latest episode of NPR's new Invisibilia podcast. The first segment features mirror-touch synesthesia - an extremely rare flavor that impacts the way a person lives.  (The second segment is fun too)  If you have the chance I recommend the audio rather than the transcript.  Invisibilia has great production values.

 

Does a bat build something like color in the echolocation model in their mind?  

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¹ There is some evidence that it is useful for abstract thinking - it is much more common among physicists, mathematicians and musicians than in the general population.

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Recipe Corner

 

Excellent on a cold Winter morning.  This makes enough for two or three people.  Nuts and fruit are great on top.

 

Quinoa breakfast

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 cup quinoa

° 2 cups water

° 2 cups soy milk or almond milk

° 2 or 3 tbl chopped walnuts or pecans

° 2 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1/4 cup maple syrup

 

Technique

 

° toast the quinoa for a medium hot pan for about 30 second and add the water. Bring it to a boil and reduce to a simmer with a lid partly covering.  Cook for about 15 minutes until it is fluffy - don't let it dry out.  

° transfer the quinoa to a blender and blend to smooth with the milk , maple syrup and cinnamon.  Test and see if it is sweet enough

° pour into bowls and sprinkle on the nuts and some fruit if you like.