THIS IS MY SCRAPBOOK, MY BLOG, MY RANT RAG AND POET'S CORNER.
ADDITIONALLY, AN IMPORTANT FUNCTION OF THIS BLOG IS THAT IT ALLOWS ME TO STORE LECTURES AND TALKS WHICH I FIND NECESSARY NEARBY FOR REFERENCE.
Here is a response to my friend Natalia on her Facebook comment to my poem Hubris:
It all comes down to the people of the world themselves. In the past the world had mighty personalities who called the shots like Stalin and Hitler. If they have flawed characters the people suffered.
Today the people are for the most part, partly in charge and yet the situation is almost as grave.
Why is this so? This is so because of the greed of quite a few of the brighter humans and the stupidity of an even larger number others. This makes it difficult for the remaining people who are intelligent enough not to be fooled, in part by some of the mass media and moral enough to want to do the right thing if for no other reason than for their children.
I would give odds of 40% that humanity will cause its own extinction in the next 200 years.
I saw a helmet from a conquering army There alone on solemn rocks : Two holes each about a finger’s width, one going in and one coming out, Marred this green and headless monument left behind.
I stand in the desert near it on the sand my boots half sunk Nothing else can be seen which would reveal more For that single pierced item laying there Tells me that it is no longer required.
And in my mind these words appeared, “My name is Cheney, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains round the eternity of that single object, Boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away...
Running Time: 0:41:07 About the Lecture About the Lecture In spite of its old age, the Second Law of Thermodynamics “is alive and kicking,” says Max Tegmark, stimulating research on “really, really big puzzles.” In Tegmark’s case, “big” encompasses the cosmos, and investigating the entropy of the universe offers one path into understanding “how we started out.”
Tegmark frames his talk with paradoxical questions: Why is entropy so low, and why is entropy so high? The first question is “crucial to understanding the arrow of time,” and involves the microscopic definition of entropy. 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, entropy in the observable universe is in “the ballpark of 1089 bits -- crudely speaking, a google.” This is much lower than the theoretical limit to how much entropy our cosmos could contain. Also, Tegmark wonders, why has our solar system ended up so far from thermal equilibrium, since when the universe was younger, the temperature was almost the same everywhere?
It turns out that in cosmology, unlike classical physics, atoms start out at uniform density and end up, abetted by gravity, “clumpy,” with gas getting denser and forming stars. Tegmark shows a supercomputer simulation of this process, which depicts the evolution of a universe with galaxies and solar systems like our own. Different temperatures in the universe aren’t due to magic, he says, just Einstein’s theory of gravity and basic gas physics.
But, Tegmark ponders, why was the universe uniform in the beginning? One “crazy sounding answer” involves inflation. A tiny region of space much smaller than an atom, which is very uniform and very dense, begins to expand exponentially, until it makes up all space in our known universe. It gets weirder. Tegmark invokes inflation to explain not only the low entropy of the cosmos, but its high entropy as well. That same 1089 bits can also be viewed as “such a big number that it suggests…that we’re in some kind of multiverse, or some much larger reality than what we can observe.” The initial conditions that make up these 10 to the 89th bits “just tell us where in space we live, our address in space.” We should call the Big Bang “not the beginning but the end of inflation in this part of space. … If we zoom out in the universe, we should expect to see much more entropy.” If you don’t get this intuitively, that’s OK, Tegmark reassures us, but “if we categorically reject ideas in science just because they feel crazy, we will probably reject whatever the correct theory is, too.”
In about 1752 (?) a Quaker man from Pennsylvania named Whitie, his real name was David, but called Whitie after White Clay Creek which passes through Delaware and Pennsylvania, was on a surveying expedition in extreme far western Virginia (now West Virginia) with George Washington. The Potomac River at this location was no more than 20 yards wide. After a lunch of salted meat and dried fruit and some beer along the River's Virginia shore Mr. Washington challenged Whitie to a contest of who could consecutively toss more coins across the river.
Each man stood on opposite sides of the river. George staying in Virginia and Whitie in Maryland. George tossed first and the Spanish silver dollar landed dry in Maryland. Whitie picked the dollar up, and spun letting go underhanded. The coin bounced on the Virginia shore. George gulped a swig of ale screamed "God Save King George" slid and let go with the toss. The coin again landed safely on the Maryland shore. Whitie matched George with a swallow of the grog also calling out the praise to King George. The second round was also a tie. George Washington was intrigued by Whitie's throwing style and how this turns out becomes obvious. George twirls and throws slips and falls. The dollar is released and travels straight up and lands in the river. Evans being a gentleman decides for what could be the winning toss he would throw over-handed like George did on his first two successful tosses. David swigs the beer yells "King George can go to hell". He winds up, let's goes and also falls down. The coin takes off on a low trajectory skips off the water and land on the Maryland dry shore. George being a gracious man and a class act accepts the coin skip as a successful toss.
This is a keystone talk in my understanding of cosmology, precisely the understanding of the arrow of time and its relationship to the origin(s) of the universe. I will have to listen to this talk a few more times before I feel comfortable with the concepts.
Over a century ago, Boltzmann and others provided a microscopic understanding for the tendency of entropy to increase. But this understanding relies ultimately on an empirical fact about cosmology: the early universe had a very low entropy. Why was it like that? Cosmologists aspire to provide a dynamical explanation for the observed state of the universe, but have had very little to say about the dramatic asymmetry between early times and late times. I will argue that the search for a natural explanation for the observed breakdown of time-reversal symmetry in cosmology leads us directly to interesting conclusions about inflation, quantum gravity, and the multiverse.
Entropyis a measure of how evenly energy is distributed in a system. In a physical system entropy provides a measure of the amount of energy that cannot be used to dowork.
When heat flows from a hot region to a cold region entropy increases, as heat is distributed throughout the system.[1]The concept of entropy is central to thesecond law of thermodynamics. The second law determines which physical processes can occur. For example, it predicts that heat flows from high temperature to low temperature in spontaneous processes. The second law of thermodynamics can be stated as saying that the entropy of an isolated systemalways increases, and processes which increase entropy can occur spontaneously. Since entropy increases as uniformity increases, the second law says qualitatively that uniformity increases.
Boltzmann brains are often referred to in the context of the "Boltzmann brain paradox" or "problem". They have also been referred to as "Boltzmann babies." [1]
The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in the universe will always increase. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?
Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but this can be explained by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle. This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.
The Boltzmann brain paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains. The rationale behind this being paradoxical is that, out of chaos, it is more likely for one instance of a complex structure to arise than for many instances of that thing to arise.
This ignores the possibility that the probability of a universe in which a brain pops into existence, without any prior mechanism driving towards its creation, may be dwarfed by the probability of a universe in which there are active mechanisms which lead to processes of development which (given a starting state that is unlikely but not as unlikely as the spontaneous appearance of a brain with no precursor) offer a reasonable probability of producing a species such as ourselves.
In a universe of the latter kind, the scenarios in which a brain can arise are naturally prone to produce many such brains, so the large number of such brains is an incidental detail.
OP-ED COLUMNIST By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: October 21, 2010
In the spring of 2010, fiscal austerity became fashionable. I use the term advisedly: the sudden consensus among Very Serious People that everyone must balance budgets now now now wasn’t based on any kind of careful analysis. It was more like a fad, something everyone professed to believe because that was what the in-crowd was saying.
And it’s a fad that has been fading lately, as evidence has accumulated that the lessons of the past remain relevant, that trying to balance budgets in the face of high unemployment and falling inflation is still a really bad idea. Most notably, the confidence fairy has been exposed as a myth. There have been widespread claims that deficit-cutting actually reduces unemployment because it reassures consumers and businesses; but multiple studies of historical record, including one by the International Monetary Fund, have shown that this claim has no basis in reality. No widespread fad ever passes, however, without leaving some fashion victims in its wake. In this case, the victims are the people of Britain, who have the misfortune to be ruled by a government that took office at the height of the austerity fad and won’t admit that it was wrong.
Britain, like America, is suffering from the aftermath of a housing and debt bubble. Its problems are compounded by London’s role as an international financial center: Britain came to rely too much on profits from wheeling and dealing to drive its economy — and on financial-industry tax payments to pay for government programs. Over-reliance on the financial industry largely explains why Britain, which came into the crisis with relatively low public debt, has seen its budget deficit soar to 11 percent of G.D.P. — slightly worse than the U.S. deficit. And there’s no question that Britain will eventually need to balance its books with spending cuts and tax increases.
The operative word here should, however, be “eventually.” Fiscal austerity will depress the economy further unless it can be offset by a fall in interest rates. Right now, interest rates in Britain, as in America, are already very low, with little room to fall further. The sensible thing, then, is to devise a plan for putting the nation’s fiscal house in order, while waiting until a solid economic recovery is under way before wielding the ax. But trendy fashion, almost by definition, isn’t sensible — and the British government seems determined to ignore the lessons of history. Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday and the rhetoric that accompanied the announcement might have come straight from the desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the farmers, liquidating the workers, and driving down wages. Or if you prefer more British precedents, it echoes the Snowden budget of 1931, which tried to restore confidence but ended up deepening the economic crisis. The British government’s plan is bold, say the pundits — and so it is. But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction. It would cut government employment by 490,000 workers — the equivalent of almost three million layoffs in the United States — at a time when the private sector is in no position to provide alternative employment. It would slash spending at a time when private demand isn’t at all ready to take up the slack.
Why is the British government doing this? The real reason has a lot to do with ideology: the Tories are using the deficit as an excuse to downsize the welfare state. But the official rationale is that there is no alternative. Indeed, there has been a noticeable change in the rhetoric of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron over the past few weeks — a shift from hope to fear. In his speech announcing the budget plan, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed to have given up on the confidence fairy — that is, on claims that the plan would have positive effects on employment and growth. Instead, it was all about the apocalypse looming if Britain failed to go down this route. Never mind that British debt as a percentage of national income is actually below its historical average; never mind that British interest rates stayed low even as the nation’s budget deficit soared, reflecting the belief of investors that the country can and will get its finances under control. Britain, declared Mr. Osborne, was on the “brink of bankruptcy.”
What happens now? Maybe Britain will get lucky, and something will come along to rescue the economy. But the best guess is that Britain in 2011 will look like Britain in 1931, or the United States in 1937, or Japan in 1997. That is, premature fiscal austerity will lead to a renewed economic slump. As always, those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
In the last in the series Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself. He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist, finds out that empty space isn't empty at all, and investigates the differences in our perception of the world in the universe and the reality.
Science, Reason, Religion & Survival Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements - some violent in the extreme - are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?
This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.
"What do we need to know about to discover life in space?"
How can we estimate the number of technological civilizations that might exist among the stars? While working as a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake (currently on the Board of the SETI Institute) conceived an approach to bound the terms involved in estimating the number of technological civilizations that may exist in our galaxy. The Drake Equation, as it has become known, was first presented by Drake in 1961 and identifies specific factors thought to play a role in the development of such civilizations. Although there is no unique solution to this equation, it is a generally accepted tool used by the scientific community to examine these factors. --Frank Drake, 1961
The equation is usually written: N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
Where,
N = The number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Within the limits of our existing technology, any practical search for distant intelligent life must necessarily be a search for some manifestation of a distant technology. In each of its last four decadal reviews, the National Research Council has emphasized the relevance and importance of searching for evidence of the electromagnetic signature of distant civilizations.
Besides illuminating the factors involved in such a search, the Drake Equation is a simple, effective tool for stimulating intellectual curiosity about the universe around us, for helping us to understand that life as we know it is the end product of a natural, cosmic evolution, and for making us realize how much we are a part of that universe. A key goal of the SETI Institute is to further high quality research that will yield additional information related to any of the factors of this fascinating equation.
The Ubiquitous Bell Curve: What it does and doesn't tell us John Mighton
The Bell Curve is an extremely beautiful and elegant mathematical object that turns up - often in surprising ways - in all spheres of human life. The Curve was first used by astronomers to correct errors in their observations, but it soon found important applications in the social and medical sciences in the eighteen hundreds. Some philosophers believe that a new kind of human being was created around this time largely due to the growth of statistical reasoning in the arts and sciences. Dr. Mighton will speak about the consequences of this new way of thinking about people, and further insights from his play called "Risk", in which he is dramatizing these ideas.
The Bell Curve also figures prominently in education as our school system is based on the implicit belief that there are natural, wide bell curves in achievement in students. In this lecture, Dr. Mighton will share evidence that this belief is false and he will describe how the arts and sciences, and society in general, might benefit if we rejected this belief.
Bruce Ames (born December 16, 1928) is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications. He is among the few hundred most-cited scientists in all fields.
Ames' current research includes identifying agents that delay the mitochondrial decay of aging, understanding the role of mitochondrial decay in aging, particularly in the brain, optimizing micronutrient intakes in the population to prevent disease, malnutrition, and obesity. He is also interested in mutagens as they relate to cancer prevention and aging.
He is a recipient of the Bolton S. Corson Medal in 1980, Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1985, the Japan Prize in 1997, the National Medal of Science in 1998 and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal in 2004[1], among many others.
He was born and raised in New York City. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. His undergraduate studies were at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his graduate studies were completed at the California Institute of Technology.
Mitochondrial decay, (a decrease in membrane potential, respiratory control ratio, cardiolipin, and cellular oxygen consumption, and an increase in oxidant by-products) appears to be a major contributor to aging and associated degenerative diseases. Oxidative damage to DNA, RNA, proteins, and lipids in mitochondrial membranes is a major consequence of this decay, resulting in functional decline of mitochondria, cells, and organs. Feeding the mitochondrial metabolites acetyl carnitine and lipoic acid to old rats rejuvenates the mitochondria and improves brain and other function. The degenerative diseases accompanying aging, such as immune dysfunction, cancer, cognitive decline, and stroke, might be delayed by an inexpensive intervention. About 40 essential micronutrients are required for metabolism and include minerals, vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids.
Micronutrient inadequacy (2 standard deviations below the RDA) is unusually widespread in the U.S. population (especially in the poor, children, adolescents, the obese, and the elderly) because of high consumption of calorie-rich micronutrient-poor unbalanced diets. Most of the world's population, particularly the poor, has inadequate intake of one or more micronutrients. Societal concern is low because no overt pathology has been associated with these levels of deficiency, e.g. 56% of the U.S. have intakes below the EAR for Mg and almost all African-Americans for vitamin D. My triage theory explains why the pathology is insidious. When a micronutrient is inadequate, nature selects for a rebalancing of metabolism, that ensures survival of the organism at the expense of metabolism whose lack has only longer term consequences. I propose that during evolution micronutrient shortages were very common, e.g. the 15 essential minerals, which are not distributed evenly on the earth. The consequences of this homeostatic response are, for example, DNA damage (future cancer), adaptive immune dysfunction (future severe infection), and mitochondrial decay (future cognitive dysfunction and accelerated aging). Much evidence supports this idea that micronutrient shortages accelerate aging.
Faster than the Speed of Light - Could the laws of physics change?
The laws of physics are usually meant to be set in stone; variability is not usually part of physics. Yet contradicting Einstein's tenet of the constancy of the speed of light raises nothing less than that possibility. I will discuss some of the more dramatic implications of a varying speed of light.
João Magueijo is Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is currently visiting Perimeter Institute and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. He received his doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge University, and has been a visiting scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University.
Perimeter Institute brings great thinkers from around the world to Canada to share their ideas on a wide variety of interesting and topical subjects. These lectures and debates are aimed at non-specialists. No mathematical or scientific knowledge is necessary or assumed. Each event is explicitly tailored for the general public and everyone is welcome to attend.
Thank You Nima Arkani-Hamed
Will big questions be answered when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) switches on in 2007? What will scientists find? Where might the research lead? Nima Arkani-Hamed, a noted particle theorist, is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He investigates a number of mysteries and interactions in nature – puzzles that are likely to have experimental consequences in the next few years via particle accelerators, like the LHC, as well as cosmological observations.
