Carola Dunn. To Davy Jones Below (2001)

Carola Dunn. To Davy Jones Below (2001) Daisy and Alec are married, after a couple of weeks in Sussex, they are on their way to the USA on the Talavera. The cast includes Gotobed, a British millionaire, and his wife Wanda, an ex-chorus girl of uncertain age; Arbuckle, an American millionaire; Philip, Daisy’s cousin, and Gloria, Arbuckle’s daughter; Miss Oliphant, a devotee of herbal remedies; Pertwee and Welford, a couple of card sharks; and assorted other characters useful as witnesses and talking scenery. Nicely done fluff, with just enough sleuthing to lull the inattentive reader into pleasant reveries.
      Alec is asked to investigate what at first looks like an accident, but subsequent events are clearly either murder or attempted murder. He’s seasick, which gives Daisy the excuse she needs to ‘vestigate. Between them, and a couple of facts radioed to the ship but not revealed to the reader, a solution of sorts is devised. It fits the facts, but does not make a case for prosecution. Still, it’s best that Alec can do, so all’s well that ends well. **½

Amanda Cross. A Trap for Fools (1989)

Amanda Cross. A Trap for Fools (1989) Canfield Adams, a much-hated professor of Islamic Studies at “the University”, is found dead on the pavement below his office window. He was pushed, it seems, and Kate Fansler is given the job of finding the killer. After much pleasant and occasionally probing conversation, she discovers that shadowy donors compromised one of her colleagues, and that another colleague’s need for cash led to blackmail. Adams found out, so he had to die. Tangles of academic politics obscure the path and impede progress, but Kate “rearranges the narrative” and arrives at the truth, not by logic and careful analysis, but with intuition and imaginative insights. This is the only weakness of this series, but the depiction of academic life, of friendships, of the life of the mind, of love, and characters we care about more than make up for it.

     Every Amanda Cross novel is spiced up with parody and satire of the mostly long-since forgotten intellectual and political buzz of the time. I think Carolyn Heilbrun, the person behind the mask of Amanda Cross, wanted to say things that needed to be said about the socio-politics of her time. She succeeds. That’s another reason I like to read these books. If you want tightly plotted procedurals, they are not for you. But if you want immersion in a pleasant world in which intellect and  feelings are given equal value, along with a bit of a puzzle to keep the story moving, then you will like them. ***

Al Shabab, another bunch of cowardly thugs

This morning, 2 April, 2015, we heard that Al Shabab claimed credit for attacking a university dormitory in Kenya and murdering a number of Christian students, who were accused of polluting the Muslim students by their presence. This evening, we heard that the count is at 147 dead and counting.

Just another example of the cowardly thugs who represent themselves as militants, as fighters for freedom. They didn't even have the guts to show their faces, they all wore masks.

And of course their leaders who ordered this murderous attack are safely out of harm's way, and will ensure it stays that way.

Honourable fighters engaged in a struggle for freedom from oppression?

Cowards, the lot of them.

Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003)

     Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003) Another collection of essays about the Science of Everyday Life. Ever wonder why honey piles up on your toast as it flows off the spoon? Or why some people are able wake up pretty close to the time they want? Or why you can skip stones on water? The answers are out there, but most of them are incomplete, and lead on to other puzzles. Everyday physics and chemistry is much more complicated than the simplified models of reality that are studied in the lab. Ingram is one of the best popular science writers we have. This book was nominated for the 2003 Science in Society book award.
     The chapter on why bread always lands buttered side down alone is worth the price: the table is just high enough that the toast rotates over 90 degrees before it touches down. It doesn’t always land spread side down of course, occasionally it’s swept off the table with a spin that stabilises it. Spin is one of the main factors in skipping stones, too. Recommended ****

Jihadists: the latest example of terrorist cowards

One of the things that stands out in the history of terrorists is their preference for soft targets. They choose schools, shopping centres, hotels, places of worship, sports arenas, buses and trains. They rarely attack military installations or bases, preferring less well protected police stations. Their attacks on military targets by preference take the form of stealth weapons such as mines buried in roads. And many such organisations have used suicide bombers.

By “they” I mean the leadership of these organisations. They take great care to protect themselves, to avoid taking part in the operations, and to be well out of the way of any counterattacks. They choose targets with little or no capability of returning fire, and they usually send their most expendable members carry out the operations. The most expendable ones are the suicide bombers, who are usually young people who have no other military value, and are naive enough not to notice that the greater good for which they give their lives are the people who send them away to blow themselves up.

In short, terrorists as a group are a mix of idealism, power lust, thuggishness, and rage. The ideology, secular or religious, is both a justification for murder and a lure for alienated and idealistic youngsters who see the mess the world is in and yearn for some meaningful role in making it better. These youngsters become the expendable human weapons-platforms used by the leaders to satisfy their dark urges.

But the one thing terrorist leaders have in common is their cowardice.

Mick O’Hare. Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? (2006)

     Mick O’Hare. Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? (2006) New Scientist’s “Last Word” collects questions and answer about whatever triggers the questioner’s curiosity. This book collects 142 questions from the early 2000s, organised by topic. The section on food and drink is the largest. Does this mean that food os the prime concern, or merely that eating takes so little brain power that there’s plenty left over for idle curiosity about the food?
     It’s a potato-chip book, compulsively readable, highly entertaining, with serious and tongue-in-cheek answers. All kinds of oddities, some of which a moderately well-read geek knows about, and some of which are news to just about everybody. The collection also illustrates the inevitable downside of increasing knowledge: the more we know collectively, the less we know individually. And as the area of knowledge expands, the boundary between the known and the unknown lengthens. This means that the more we know, the more there is to be found out. And that’s a Good Thing.
     Highly recommended. ***

Schrödinger’s Cat (again): Reality is interactions

     Schrödinger’s Cat (again)

A recent issue of New Scientist had a series of articles on Chance. One of these cited quantum physics (QP) to make the point that the universe is fundamentally random. No problem with that, but the reference and a New Yorker cartoon once again made me think about Schrödinger’s cat.

 I can’t do the QP math, but I do understand what QP has shown: that at the atomic level, events happen at random, there are weird linkages between events, that the elementary entities each may exist (if that is the word) in any of a small suite of states, that measurement of one property or state will destroy information about another property or state, and so on. In practical terms, this means that at the most fundamental level we can at best specify probabilities. In QP, the wave-function specifies these probabilities with astonishing precision.

     And that’s where Schrödinger’s Cat comes in. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, which I quote because it’s beautifully concise and clear:
     Schrödinger's cat: A cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

     And here’s the pretty picture:

     Schrödinger’s Cat is one of those cultural tokens that people use to point to a presumed common notion, in this case, QP’s weirdness. Imagine, a cat being both alive and dead until you open the lid of the box and look inside!
     Wikipedia takes up the question of how to interpret the weird result:
     In the Copenhagen interpretation, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place.
    

 That word “observation” includes a lot of assumptions, and it’s these assumptions that create the supposed paradox. It seems obvious to me that Niels Bohr is right that “observation” merely means “measurement”, and does not mean “noticed by a human being”. But I want to go beyond Niels Bohr, and alternative interpretations (see The Wiki article for more). The other interpretations are attempts to resolve a supposed paradox, but I don’t think there’s any paradox to be resolved.
     Note again the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or another. I interpret QP to mean that "superposition" is a label for what we cannot know until we measure it. But measurement is a series of interactions, the last of which triggers a stream of photons that our eyes can detect. There follows another series of interactions, which may end with our saying, “Here kitty, kitty!”

     Measurement is not a privileged interaction. All interactions will change a particle’s state. In Schrödinger's thought experiment, we may suppose that the interaction occurs when the device detects the particle emitted by the radioactive atom. But I think that's not the case. The interaction occurs when the atom decays, when something occurs inside the nucleus. If (and only if) we are able to amplify the effect of that first interaction (e.g, by detecting the radioactivity), can we say, with a good deal of confidence, that the particle was, at the moment of interaction, in some state, that the wave function describing the particle's state has collapsed. “At the moment of interaction” is the key phrase: we cannot know what the state of the particle was before that moment, and we cannot know its subsequent history, any more than we knew anything of its history prior to the measurement. We can make another measurement, in which case we may be faced with the conundrum of what exactly the particle was between measurements.

     You may infer that I don't think Schrödinger’s Cat creates a paradoxical superposition of dead/alive. You will be right.
     I think it’s the word “observation” that has misled people. It implies an observer. But there is no observer. There are only interactions. When we say we “observe” something, that statement is itself an interaction, triggered by a complex series of prior interactions. What’s more, this series of interactions is, according to QP, fundamentally untraceable, because a measurement is an interposition in the chain of interactions, and so from that point on the chain will be different than it would have been absent the measurement. The measurement changes the state of the particle, and therefore determines the result of the next interaction. By measuring it, we change the history of the particle.

      What we may wish to think of as a property of a particle is merely an interaction that is observed in some specified context. For that matter, a particle is merely a collection of consistent interactions.
     In short, reality is interactions. That's all there is.

     2015-03-27 Updated 2015-07-07