Dumb Birds (Kracht, A Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, 2019)

 

Matt Kracht. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (2019) Early in his life, Kracht suffered exposure to the mysteries of bird watching. It took, but it left some emotional scars. So he wrote this book, a nicely done satire on field guides, and a fairly gentle put-down of bird watchers. I enjoyed it. But some of the more tight-assed members of the tribe may take offense. It does get a bit repetitive.

 Recommended, but you have been warned. **½

The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins, 2009)

 Richard Dawkins. The Greatest Show On Earth. (2009) Most of Dawkins’s work has been the attempt to convince people that Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design, is wrong. This book is his marshalling of the evidence that evolution is real, and that we have increasing knowledge and understanding of how it happens. The basic principle is random variation constrained by deterministic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s because most mutations do not improve the organism’s chances of surviving long enough to breed, or to outbreed siblings and cousins, that the few favourable mutations not only gain a foothold but spread. IOW, while mutations are random, their effects are not, and that is enough to guarantee that most beneficial mutations will usually spread while deleterious ones will not (if they haven’t killed their hosts). One consequence is that the best versions of essential genes are conserved across species. The preservation and spread of favourable genotypes is what “natural selection” actually means.

A well done book, which in the end is the best refutation to the pseudoscience peddled  by the creationists. Recommended. ****

Footnote: It seems to me that one of the motivations for Creationism is a misreading of the Bible. The assumption seems to be that the factual truth is primary. Or Fundamental. Or even the Only Truth. Therefore there is only one legitimate method of interpreting the biblical texts, namely to assume its factual truth. From this point of view, only factual truth can guarantee the truth of whatever moral or theological or other propositions the reader wishes to assert.

But the assumption that factual truth proves moral, theological, and other abstract truths has a fundamental problem for the believer: By making factual truth primary, religious truths are logically contingent. That means that any changes in factual truths may change religious truths. At some level, fundamentalists seem to understand this, hence their insistence that the factual truths they read into the biblical narratives cannot be contradicted. It also means they must find ways of proving the truth of the facts as stated in the Bible.

Why the Toast Always Lands Buttered Side Down (Yes, there's an explanation).

 

Richard Robinson. Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Science of Murphy’s Law. (2005) Just what the title says – an investigation into failure, and our propensity to underestimate the probability that something will go wrong. We evaluate the odds as high or low in terms of our desired outcomes. So we buy lottery tickets. We evaluate risk in terms of our fears. So many people would rather drive than fly. Selective memory supplies the misleading data that confirms our fears or supports our desires. So we see coincidence as proof of some rule or of divine protection.

And so on.

Many of these mistakes in parsing the universe are summed up in proverbs. A watched pot never boils. Oh yes it does, but the few times you watch it, it seems to take forever. The extended version is the apparently universal experience that something works perfectly well until you show it off to someone. It’s especially embarrassing when that something is you playing the piano.

All in all, a nicely done, often amusing, and mostly painless reminder of the science that explains why the world often doesn’t work the way we want it to. By the way, toast does land buttered side down more often than not. That’s because it usually drops from about table height, and thus has just enough time to turn over so it’s buttered side down just before hits the floor.

Recommended. ***

What's the Economy For? (Patel, The Value of Nothing, 2009)

Raj Patel. The Value of Nothing. (2009) Modern economic theory ascribes a value of $0 to externals. For example, treating effluent before discharging it into the nearest watercourse costs money, but untreated effluent costs nothing. More precisely, leaving the purification of effluent to natural processes costs nothing. 

Since we believe the aim of our economy is to maximise profit, we believe that the aim of our producers is to minimise cost, which in turn means to maximise externals. It also means minimising the provision of social goods, which cost money. Thus the drive to minimise taxes, which pay not only for necessities but also for amenities. Finally, the drive to maximise profits spurs the quest to privatise public goods such as education and parks, and to oppose the transfer of necessary services such as healthcare from private to public organisations.

Patel’s book is an extended discussion on the value of those external processes that suppsedly cost nothing. Hence the title. He begins by estimating the full cost of those zero-cost externals. An example is the $3.95 hamburger whose true cost is about $200.

Like many others who have meditated on the costs of using nature to do our dirty work, he concludes that these externals provide services of value, if only the monetary cost avoided by using them. From that starting point, he widens his discussion. The book is an argument for an economy that recognises that ecosystems are fundamental, and instead of treating them as zero-cost, treats them as the essential and hence most valuable part of the economy. He understands that any change to our economic systems entails changes to our politics, and discusses those as well, adducing examples of successful local, communal control.

Well, that’s a simplification of this book, which touches on everything that’s implied by the question What is the economy for? 

Recommended. ****

Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh, then Think.

Marc Abrahams. The Ig Nobel Prizes 2 (2004) The Ig Nobel Prizes were devised at Harvard. They’ve grown in size and prestige. Many Nobel winners have happily participated in awarding them, and most winners of the Ig Nobels have felt honoured by the recognition of their research, which First makes you laugh, then makes you think. Traditions such as folding the event program into paper airplanes to be launched at the stage, and a rigidly enforced time limit on the acceptance speech, maintain the Goonish ambience.

Anyone can nominate anyone for an Ig Nobel. Some of the prizes are not so subtle satiric critiques of pseudoscience and other nonsense, but most are awarded for valid scientific discoveries, and many are more significant than a quick read my suggest. Like anecdotes, they may prompt deeper questions than the one they answered.

This collection is well worth whatever you pay for it. I found my copy at a yard sale, hence wildly under-priced compared to its value. A few examples:

2001 Ig Nobel for Astrophysics, to Rex and Rexella Van Impe, evangelists, for their discovery that black holes meet all the criteria for Hell.

2004 Ig Nobel for Public Health, to Jillian Clarke, high school student, for her investigation of the 5-Second Rule for food that falls on the floor. (It fails, but by how much depends on the floor covering).

2024 winners here: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

A valuable reference work. Recommended ****

Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****

Darwin Awards 3 (2003)

 Wendy Northcutt. The Darwin Awards III (2003) A Darwin Awards are given posthumously to people who have removed themselves from the gene pool by means less than wise, and have thereby presumably removed deleterious genes. The tales recounted here raise a mix of laughter, astonishment, and pity, but never in the same proportions.

An example: In Finland, in October 2001, a group of friends were stranded by the side of the freeway after running out of gas. No one stopped to help, so one of them lay down the middle of the roadway, expecting traffic to stop. It didn’t, and his unwise attempt to help caused his demise. Confirmed.

The editors are careful to distinguish between confirmed cases, probably true ones, and personal accounts. Mildly amusing illustrations add to the charm of the book. And it is oddly charming: the generally high level of confidence displayed by the award winners before physics and chemistry interfered with their aims is admirable.

Recommended if you can find a copy. ***

Does Anything Eat Wasps? (New Scientist, 2005)

 New Scientist). Does Anything Eat Wasps (2005) Yes, lots of things eat wasps! Even other wasps eat wasps. You will find long (but incomplete) list on pages 82 to 84 of this wonderful collection of questions asked by readers of New Scientist.

For example, How much does a human head weigh? (About 10 lbs/5kg, which helps explain neck pain, but not the kind triggered by annoying cousins and neighbours). How many species of microbes live on and in the human body? (Nobody knows for sure, and since the question was asked, DNA surveys suggest it’s in the thousands at least. As for population, it’s likely in the trillions.)

Other readers (some of them even experts) provide the answers. An index makes this not only fun but useful. Highly recommended. Only downside: Once you’ve found an answer to a question, you just have to read the next question and its answers. And the next one.... ****

Time (Some rambling thoughts)

 Time

2024-12-08 to 11 

Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) says that time is one of the four dimensions of spacetime. String theory claims there are more dimensions, but that’s a side issue.

We move through the three space dimensions. SR shows that our motion affects how we perceive motion and time.

We measure our own motion within our frame of reference. In fact, measuring motion defines a frame of reference. We ride in a car sitting still. But the car moves at 100 kph along the highway, so we are moving at 100kph along the highway, too. And the Earth spins, and orbits the sun, and the solar system moves within the local star cluster, which moves within the spiral arm that orbits the Galaxy. The Galaxy spins, and moves towards Andromeda. And so on.

Within us, the blood moves, air moves, muscles expand and contract, molecules move about and react with each other. Within larger molecules, groups of atoms move this way and that as the molecule changes shape. The atoms themselves move, and within the atom, the electrons and nucleus move. In fact, they move so much that the best we can do to specify their motion is to describe it as a cloud of possibilities, using a wave function that’s said to collapse when we measure those motions.

Heisenberg says the more precisely we measure the motion of electrons etc, the less precise the measurement of their location. Or the more we know about how the electron moves, the less we know about where it is. Which interpretation of the math is correct? I don’t know. Take your pick.

Why do I emphasise motion? Because all motion “takes time.” That is, any change in a space dimension entails a change in the time dimension. This seems to me the intimate integration of space and time that Einstein formalised as General Relativity. I hope this interpretation Einstein’s insight is correct.

So the other day I was thinking about time as a dimension, for about the 777th time. It had occurred to me that if we move through space, what would it mean to say that we move through time?

We normally think of time as “passing”, and point to clocks that measure that passage one tick at a time. Where a tick is a small motion of something. In the international standard of time  measurement that tick is a single cycle of the vibration of caesium:

The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]

That “.... one tick at a time...” is either evidence of our brain’s conceptualising limits, or else proof that time is real in the same sense that space is real. Take your pick. I mention this puzzle because recently Carlo Rovelli and other physicists have wondered whether time is real or an illusion. Maybe space is all there is, and the feeling that time passes is created by our brains. The question may have been instigated by the awareness that being aware means being aware of time passing.

We speak of “spending time”, and continue with the terrifying thought that once we’ve spent a chunk of time, we can’t (unlike with money) earn an equivalent chunk of time to replace what was spent. Heraclitus supposedly said that we never step in the same river twice, since the water has flowed on between steps. Time, he said, is like that river. There’s a hymn that includes the phrase “time, like an ever-flowing stream”, which is a cliche by now. These ways of thinking all imply that time is some kind of entity. It’s not like space. Which may be why we have trouble dealing with Einstein’s concept of spacetime.

Does thinking of time as something we move through solve these conceptual problems? Maybe. Let’s try it.

Begin by supposing that there’s more than one time dimension. We happen to be confined to a line within that space, our timeline. Specify a frame of reference and you specify a timeline. We move through time along that line whenever we move through space. And as I’ve sketched above, we are always moving with respect to some other entity. Utter repose is impossible. Even death entails motion: as our body decays, its bits and pieces move in all directions, transported by the critters that eat them or the wind and water that carries them away. The skeleton that remains moves with the Earth.  

Now suppose that we could move off that timeline, in any direction, sideways, up and down, at an angle, in a circle. Just as in space we can take a shortcut, we could take a shortcut in time, and arrive at a future point on out timeline without passing through the intermediate ones. Time travel the would be moving off our timeline, moving around in time, and rejoining our timeline.

If time is multidimensional, would there be some way of writing a formal theory that could be tested? I’ll leave that up to the people who can handle the math. But the concept could work as a premise for sci-fi story. I’m sure the idea has occurred to someone else. If not, I hereby claim first invention (or discovery), and grant a non-transferable licence to anyone who wants to use it. Just give me a cut of the royalties.

© W. Kirchmeir

Time (Lapham's Quarterly 7:04)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7:04: Time (2014) How do you think about time? Is it a river that carries us along? Is it some abstract something that passes? Is it something that one spends, and once spent, is gone forever?

These metaphors and more are the ways we conceive of Time. Physicists point out that time is a conundrum. On the one hand all closed systems tend towards disorder. Open systems can scavenge energy that drives transformations that maintain or increase order. When that external energy input stops, the system decays into increasing disorder. Thus the forward direction of the Arrow of Time, which we experience as the flow or passing of time.

Expressions and musings about that experience form the bulk of this collection. Any reader will recognise their own experience and thoughts represented here. But there’s almost nothing about time as an aspect of reality.

Albert Einstein’s theories play a cameo role. More recent (and current) problems with time as a physical fact, or an aspect of reality, don’t show up at all. So let me offer a few musings of my own.

For us humans, the central fact of time is that for each of us it will end. For some that end

comes before the body disintegrates, when dementia destroys memories, and in doing so destroys the self. Knowing that this could happen to me creates a dread that I hurriedly push down below the tissue-thin surface of mind that I experience as my self. Time is the essence of what the brain constructs as my experience of reality. Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. That means my self, me, I exist only while I’m happening. Maybe that’s why the Christian creed asserts a belief in the resurrection of the body.

When I was growing up, the usual measure of distance was time. The next village was a half-hour away. Gruber’s farmstead was 3/4 hour away. The post office was 5 minutes away. And so on. So Einstein’s space-time to me seemed fairly obvious when I first read about it. Of course, I didn’t know the math that combines these aspects of reality. But I knew that moving through space always took time. Einstein’s space-time clarifies this: To move through space requires movement through time.

So what happens when we are standing still? Why do we still move through time? Well, we stand still within our frame of reference. But that frame of reference is moving with respect to every other frame of reference you care to specify. Which means we are not standing still. Which also means that time transcends frames of reference. Or that a frame of reference is specifiable only as moving through time. Which makes time, not space, the fundamental “whatever-it-is” of reality.

Maybe.

To exist means moving through time. When an entity ceases to exist, it disappears. But nothing disappears. So to cease to exist means to change into something else. 

Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. Anesthesia interrupts consciousness. Sleep is a different form of consciousness. When you “wake up from” from anesthesia, there is no sense that time has passed. Well, that’s my experience. But when I wake up from sleep, I know that time has passed, because I have memories of dreaming. I don’t know about comas, but descriptions of the experience suggest that comas are interruptions of consciousness like anesthesia.

Since consciousness exists only while it’s happening, time is of the essence of consciousness.

“Exist” implies time. Hence the question “Does God exist?” is a non-question, since by definition God is not in time but beyond it. (That phrasing shows that we can draw logical conclusions from statements that refer to things we cannot imagine.)

Time is a puzzle.

As always, this collection is an excellent overview and sampling of what humans have thought and imagined and reported about its topic. Recommended. ****

Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. **** 

We All Live In A Bubble (The Reality Bubble, Tong, 2019)

 Ziya Tong. The Reality Bubble (2019) We all live in a bubble created by our brains. The bubble includes the simulation of physical reality and the social and psychological realities we’ve learned to think of as just the way things are. But these realities have blind spots. Tong begins with the visual blind spot and spends a good deal of time describing what we can’t or don’t see because of our limited sensory and cognitive equipment. Science provides methods for filling in the blind spots, but it’s limited by the social and conceptual environment of its time, and its results are always tentative and incomplete. But it’s the best tool we have.
     Tong builds on this insight to describe the blind spots that make the bubbles dangerously comfortable places to live. The most serious blind spots are in our images of our relation to the non-human world. We see ourselves as different and separate from our environment. But that environment is our life support system. Misconceiving that fact will destroy human life as we know it. It’s already destroyed huge swaths of non-human life: in the last century, about 90% of wildlife has disappeared, partly because we’ve hunted it, but mostly because we’ve converted their habitats into agricultural land.
      Tong’s facts and insights range from exhilarating to depressing. Her final explicit message is that we must see what the blind spots hide from us, else we will continue to make suicidal choices. I don’t see good odds of that change happening. Policy makers are abysmally ignorant of the most basic science, and the rest of us are not much better. Economics is fatally flawed. The Friedmanites believe that efficiency means converting as many costs as possible into externalities, which don’t show up in profit-and-loss statements. So-called capitalism assumes that profit is the sole purpose of business. Very few economists show any kind of awareness of science and technology other than as a means of increasing profits. The natural world is perceived as a bundle of resources to be converted into cash as efficiently as possible. Not doing so is considered wasteful.
     In general, people believe that a rising GDP and increased productivity are signs of economic health. GDP merely tracks the money, not what it buys. Increasing productivity requires increasing consumption, not to mention that much of what’s produced satisfies mere whim. We believe that having more stuff means a better standard of living. Etc. And ever and again we are told that we must balance economic values against environmental costs, as if the economy were independent of the environment. That particular delusion amounts to insanity.
    Buy or borrow the book and read it. ****

How It Is Made (Hawks, 1946)

 Ellison Hawks. How It Is Made. (1946) Internal evidence in text and images shows the book was originally published ca. 1930. An online search revealed that this edition was published in 1946.
     As an introduction to the technology of the time, it’s excellent. It’s also a historical record, not only of the technology, but also the attitudes towards science and industry. Hawks expresses, and expects his readers to share, a generally admiring and prideful stance towards the triumphs of human ingenuity. There is not a hint of environmental awareness: it’s all about making things that will serve human needs and desires. Hawks is also firmly patriotic: England is still the Workshop of the World, although some references suggest Hawks knew that the USA was supplanting Great Britain as the industrial leader.
     An interesting compendium. Allowing for surprisingly minor advances in most technologies, still a good introduction to the engineering that we all rely on. The most significant differences between then and now are the use of plastics, the development of solid-state electronics, and the spread of computers into every nook and cranny of our daily lives. Recommended if you can find a copy. ***
     More about Ellison: https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2009/01/ellison-hawks.html

 

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all except the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the filtered, hence limited, data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

Existential Physics (Hossenfelder 2022)

     Sabine Hossenfelder. Existential Physics (2022) Hossenfelder has made a YouTube reputation as a disturber and explainer. Search for her videos; they’re fun and enlightening. She believes that modern physics is in crisis because it claims more insight and understanding than is warranted by experiment and observation, especially when it comes to dark matter and energy. The theories, the sets of interlocking equations, describe what’s measured, but for consistency’s sake, theorists have added entities that haven’t been observed to interact with the entities that we know about. In her Warning (Foreword), she says, “Science has limits, and yet humanity has always sought meaning beyond those limits.” Quite so.
     Then Hossenfelder goes on to show how science can inform some of the answers to the questions that exceed the limits of science. Science can clarify and disambiguate some of those questions. For example, do we have free will? The scientific answer (summarised) is: “No, if by free will you mean the ability to choose without being subject to the laws of physics.”

     For choosing is a brain-function, and brains function according the laws of physics. This fact has funked recent philosophers, who see no way out of the answer. But there is one: when we deliberately choose we figure alternatives, and weigh their desirability. We may choose differently than we chose in the past or will choose in the future. We will often choose differently than others choose. Thus, while our choices may not be freely willed, neither are they automatic. We aren’t automatons; we are agents. But we can’t choose without preferring one alternative to the others. Since our preferences are shaped by our genetics and our experience, in that sense, the choice is not “free”. However, we can choose to change our preferences. Odd, that. Is the choice to change our preference free or not? At the neurological level, I think no. At the psychological level, I think yes. And then there's  the spoiler question: How would you distinguish between free and determined choice? To choose is to exercise preferences and desires. Even if those preferences and desires are determined, the choice could still be free. You just can't tell.
     Hossenfelder does fall into what I think is the common philosophical error of physicists: She believes that physics reveals reality as it really is. Or at least that it is closer to doing so than the messier, less abstract sciences such as chemistry, biology, psychology, and so on. She reminds us that every "emergent property" that biology describes can be explained by chemistry and physics, and that everything that chemistry describes can be explained by physics. Neurology is solving some of the puzzles of psychology by showing how brain function varies with different behaviours, and emotions. Or at least suggesting how to reframe the puzzles.
     In short, she says, no so-called “emergent” phenomenon has (so far) been found to be inexplicable by the lower level from it which supposedly emerged. AFAIK, she’s right. But since the more abstract theories are derived from and explain the less abstract ones, that’s not, I think, a surprise. Logically, the more abstract explanation is equivalent to the less abstract one, just simpler.
     As I see it, physics describes the structure of reality. Einstein’s space-time makes this absolutely clear: What we observe depends on where in space-time we are and how we are moving relative to other entities. Special relativity describes how one observer’s worldview (measurements) is precisely transformable into another observer’s worldview: a clock runs fast from one POV, runs slow from another, and we can calculate exactly how much the measurements differ. (These calculations are necessary for GPS systems to function.) General relativity (GR) describes the geometry of space-time, within which we entities live and move and have our being - and observe each other within the constraints descibed by special relativity.
     Quantum mechanics (QM) shows that what we observe depends on the event’s context: Electrons behave like particles in some contexts, and like waves in others. Or better, wave equations describe some electron behaviours, and particle equations describe others. None describe electrons. And those equations are the best descriptions we have, so far. There are probably better ones “out there”, and maybe they’ll be discovered. But not in my lifetime, I think. Bummer.

     The fact that GR and QM cannot (at present) be reconciled should not surprise us either, I think. Both are highly abstract descriptions of what’s common and different in our perceptions of reality. Our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains. We can compare each other’s perceptions, and note whether we perceive the same differences and similarities. That’s the beginning of science, and it’s already one level of abstraction away from the simulation which is our experience of the world around us. But that simulation is itself an abstraction, constructed (computed?) by our brains from the sense data delivered  to it, data that already processed by the sensors. The simulation is sufficiently accurate that we can navigate the world, get our food, find our mates, etc. It must be structurally similar to reality, else we could not survive. It may make sense to say that the topology of our experience (the simulation) must be similar enough to the topology of reality to enable our survival. I don’t know enough about topology or brain function to be able to say. I also haven’t a clue how the brain’s simulation becomes what “I” experience. I suspect it’s because “I” is part of the simulation, probably the essential part, but how would one test that notion?
     I enjoyed this book, because (as the above may show) it prompted rethinking many of my ideas. I will read it again. Hossenfelder is an excellent explainer.
     Recommended. ****

The Disordered Cosmos (Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 2021)

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The Disordered Cosmos. (2021) A mix of science, history of science, memoir, sociology, and psychology. Prescod-Weinstein’s thesis is that while Western science has given us unimaginable insight into the structure of the cosmos, it has also ignored, deprecated or suppressed the contributions of women and Indigenous people. Worse, it has often dismissed their contributions as mere superstition.
     I found this book both exhilarating and painful to read. Exhilarating because of her skill in explaining the abstruse and esoteric concepts that are the core of modern physics. Painful because of what it cost her to achieve these insights. She played the academic game, and achieved academic career success. She’s now using her position to try to change the culture of science. I hope she succeeds.
     One thing her book confirms: Modern physics is mostly about how we cannot know what we would like to know. The equations describe mysteries so well that we can predict the interactions we will measure in our experiments and observations. But exactly what the interacting entities are is unknown, and likely unknowable. Given invisible matter and contestable energy, we may never know more than a tiny fraction of the cosmos, and understand less. Perhaps we are limited by our very nature: we are stardust, electromagnetic entities.
     Read this book. ****

Obsolescent Science: This Idea Must Die (Brockman, 2015)

John Brockman, ed. This Idea Must Die! (2015) A reread, and worth it. The contributors sometimes contradict each other. Their mini-essays constitute a course in science. It seems that explaining why an idea is no longer useful or may have become an impediment requires explaining it clearly enough that the reasons for killing it make sense. I enjoyed reading these arguments again.
     One idea that’s not mentioned as worthy of forcible retirement is that Science Describes Reality. It doesn’t. It constructs conceptual models of reality. Several of the essays attack one or another of these models as misleading or worse.  But all the arguments start with the assumption that what’s made the idea obsolete is that it no longer describes reality well enough to warrant acceptance. But taken together, the discussions show that science doesn’t describe reality at all.
     We can’t apprehend reality. The best we can do is to compare our perceptions, the simulations of reality that our brains construct. When we do that, we discover whether we perceive the same similarities and differences. We discover whether our perceptions have common structures. Science uses experiment and observation to methodically examine, and mathematics to describe these common structures. Thus science is about how we perceive reality. We do pretty well, actually. Mathematics is the language of structures, which is why it works so well in science. It’s also the only universal part of language. There is more to be said about the universality of mathematics, but this comment is already longer than it needs to be.
     Thoroughly enjoyable, and highly recommended. ****

Why Right and Left are (almost) indistingushiable.

  Martin Gardner. The New Ambidextrous Universe (rev. ed. 1990) A revised version of what  Gardner understood of physics in 1990. He acknowledges the book is outdated (evidence for the Higgs boson has since been found, for example), but it’s still a good overview of the Standard Model and its implications. The title refers to the arbitrariness of the terms Left and Right. Our usage is purely conventional. Without a face-to-face encounter, even a picture can’t define the convention, since one has to know it in order to reproduce the picture the right (!) way round. That would severely limit attempts to communicate with aliens. Left-right happens to be a necessary category of symmetry, without which theories of physics don't make sense.

    Gardner writes well and clearly, with a sly wit that sometimes breaks through his earnestness. One does need at least a high school knowledge of physics to grasp some of the explanations, but the central thesis is accessible to anyone.

     Oh, about "almost indistinguishable": I don't understand it, but it seems to have something to do with C-parity. Clarifications and corrections desired.

    Recommended ****

Evolution 101: What it isn’t, and what it is.

It's taken me quite a few decades to clarify my understanding of evolution.

For example, like many people, I once believed that evolution somehow improves a species. Problem is that we think of improvements from our human point of view. That often makes our notions of improvement irrelevant. And even when our notions of improvement are relevant, they may be mistaken.

A widespread mistaken expectation is that evolutionary theory gives definitive answers. It doesn't. No science does, although some answers are more definitive than others.

Several years ago, a blog I read claimed that the epicanthic fold is “unimportant” if not “useless”, and therefore its existence makes the theory of evolution doubtful. For evolution is all about developing useful traits, right?

Well, no, actually. I'll take up the epicanthic fold.

a) "Unimportant" and "important" aren't what a human might think they are. Just because someone may think something is an unimportant feature doesn't mean that it really is. What’s more, “important” depends on context. "Context" for an organism means its environment.

b) The epicanthic fold may be a consequence of genetic drift. Evolution will not eliminate neutral changes in the genome. Accidents of mating may therefore concentrate some part of a genome and so enhance a particular variation of some trait. The primary accident of mating that affects this is the size of the mating pool. In a small population, genetic drift can show up within half a dozen generations or less, and can disappear just as quickly. In larger populations the effect is slower. However, a trait may become universal.  A secondary cause of genetic drift is aesthetic preferences (for want of a better term), aka as "sexual selection".

c) Actually, the epicanthic fold is helpful in the Arctic in late winter and early spring, when there's still lots of snow around, and the sun is higher in the sky. By shading the pupil of the eye, it reduces the glare from snow and sky. Fact is, the Inuit made sunglasses by cutting narrow slits in flat bones which were fastened in front of the eyes. These are artificial epicanthic folds taken to the extreme, so to speak. It’s also helpful in insulating the eye.

d) The epicanthic fold shows up in several variations. I have a version, but it's not like the one you would see on a Japanese person.

Generally speaking, the phrase "survival of the fittest" has caused much misunderstanding of evolution. It does not mean "survival of the strongest or fastest or etc". It means survival of those who fit their environment best; those which are the best suited to their environment. At the time the phrase was coined, “physically fit” was also becoming common. It meant something like “physically well put together, hence suited to strenuous exercise”, but quickly morphed into “physically superior”.

“Being best suited to their environment”  has a consequence that may seem counterintuitive when evolution is seen as primarily explaining changes. Evolution will preserve traits necessary for life, or that maintain a good adaptation to the environment even when the environment changes. That’s why we share so much of our genome with other animals. The shared bits code for features such as enzymes or hearts, without which survival would be impossible or difficult in any environment.

On the other hand, genetic changes can change the environment, because every organism is part of the environment from the point of view of the other organisms in that environment. If the change confers some survival advantage, there will be new selective pressures on some of the other organisms, and they may change, which may change the selective pressures on still other organisms, including the one that triggered the changes. That means that adaptation is a complicated feedback loop. Or rather a feedback tangle, which means it’s a complex system. As in ecosystem. Unfortunately, our brains are not very good at making sense of simple systems, let alone complicated ones.

As for genetic determinism: People who believe that genes rule are way behind the curve. Genes cannot "determine" anything in the absence of environmental inputs, which includes inputs from other components of the organism itself. In fact many genes will have no effect until some environmental trigger causes them to "express", that is, to start making the proteins they specify. What happens next may eventually trigger other genes. This, in a general way, is how an organism grows and develops.

You are what you are because of your genes _and_ your environment, and your environment includes the environment of your ancestors. Environmental factors can change the DNA by a process called "methylation", which affects gene expression. One consequence of methylation is that a mother's or father's illness can affect their children and grandchildren, and possibly even their great-grandchildren.

Evolution is complicated, but it works because of the interaction of the environment and genetic differences between individuals. If an individual lives long enough to reproduce, its genes and the genes of its mate will survive for another generation. If some variation improves the odds of having more offspring than average, that variation may spread through the following generations until it dominates the population. Cumulative changes may make offspring long separated in time and space so different that they are different species.

But what’s a species? That’s another concept that's not so easy to define. I’m not happy with my concept. I may discuss the results of my attempts at clarification here. Or maybe not.

Old Ideas: John Grant on Discarded Science

 John Grant. Discarded Science (2006) A survey of superseded science, some pseudosciences,

and the occasional deliberate scam. Some, such as astrology and homeopathy, have continued to the present day. A few, such as continental drift, turned out to have a kernel of accurate insight which was developed into more or less settled science.
     Grant traces how later scientific inquiry corrected many of these early ideas. However, I don’t think he fully acknowledges the role of the human desire for explanation and understanding. We feel uncomfortable when faced with the inexplicable. So we concoct comforting theories, based on whatever evidence we have, and always informed with whatever assumptions about reality make sense at the time. He does once in a while show how discoveries in one area prompt new ideas in other areas. For example, Mesmer’s notions of “animal magnetism” made sense at a time when magnetism was not well understood, but experiments had begun to reveal how it worked.
     An entertaining survey. I’m keeping it for reference. Recommended. ***