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

Louis L’Amour. Riding for the Brand (1986)

 

    Louis L’Amour. Riding for the Brand (1986) A collection of short stories, the second one that L’Amour issued because some other publisher had put out a collection without his approval. I’d like to know more about the copyright issues. He added introductory remarks, which made it possible to copyright this collection, even though he’d lost the rights to some of the stories.
     The stories are nicely done bite-size chunks of typical L’Amour material: the tough loner wandering in search of some stability, who becomes entangled in a conflict despite his efforts to keep to himself, and eventually defeats the forces of disorder and chaos. His reward is of course the girl, who usually has a nice little property attached.
     L’Amour has said of himself that I like to think of myself in the oral tradition – as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. I think he’s right, especially with the reference to the troubadour, who sang songs of chivalry, of knights errant that fought and destroyed the forces of darkness, protected the weak against the rapaciousness of the strong, and were guided by a ethic that made self-preservation important only because you can’t fight if you’re dead. His romance has more than a few traits of Courtly Love, with the Girl always presented as nearly unattainable, and in every respect a paragon of womanhood.
     These short stories show that L’Amour was a master of the clearly delineated character-driven plot, and of sketching a complete world for the story’s setting. Each of these tales has enough implicit complexity to make for easy conversion to a movie.  The impression of L’Amour that one gets from them is of a man who had a strong romantic streak, a great love of the Western landscape, admiration for the people who settled there and survived, and a clear-eyed awareness of the necessity of impersonal ruthlessness when justice depends on a man's ability to fight and kill the lawbreaker. ***

Dr. Karl Theodor Heigel. Andreas Hofer. Ein Vortrag (1875)

     

Dr. Karl Theodor Heigel. Andreas Hofer. Ein Vortrag (1875) The title translates as Andreas Hofer: A Lecture, it’s the text of a talk given at a meeting of the Münchener Volksbildungsverein, which I infer to be one of the many societies for popular education that flourished all over Europe in the 19th century. Heigel surveys Hofer’s life, and analyses the resistance to Bavarian and French occupation of the Tyrol. This occupation was a part of the messy transfers of territory during the Napoleonic wars. Bavaria got the Tyrol because Austria was defeated. Later, when Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, the Tyrol reverted to Austria.
     Hofer was a Tyrolese patriot and fervent subject of the Hapsburg Emperor. One of the tragedies in his story is that Vienna didn’t feel strong enough to support his fight, even though he saw it as a struggle for the Tyrol’s rightful place in the Hapsburg empire. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hofer.
     The lecture is quite readable, clearly composed to be heard by a non-academic audience. Heigel proposes two main theses: first, that Hofer was a complicated character, with many virtues and faults, whose adherence to principle could be seen as stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds; and second, that his patriotism is a model for German nationalists.
     Apparently, at the time Austrians didn’t revere Hofer as they later did. I was taught that Hofer was an iconic Austrian patriot, a model for Austrian self-awareness. Heigel equivocates about his admiration of Hofer’s resistance to Bavarian authority, partly I think because he can’t very well defend a rebel against his own government, and partly because Hofer was merely a peasant. As a military leader, Hofer is notable as a wager of what we now call guerrilla warfare. In the last few paragraphs Heigel slides into pan-German nationalism, and elevates Hofer from local rebel to national hero. Neat trick.
     The author, a professor of history and Bavarian State Archivist, wrote a number of works on German and Austrian history. Collections are available, but I don’t know whether or which collection includes this lecture. My copy is an original. I could not find an entry for it in the German National Library. German Wiki has a brief bio: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Theodor_von_Heigel
     Interesting and informative, despite its tendentious use of Hofer for Heigel’s pan-German ideology. **½

Update 2020 06 28: I donated this pamphlet to the University if Alberta, Edmonton. As far as I know it one of only three extant copies.

Dan Riskin. Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You (2014)

     Dan Riskin. Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You (2014) One of those popular science books that not only tells you lots of cool stuff, but changes the way you look at the world around you. Riskin takes us back to basics: Nature really is red in tooth and claw, and we’d better not forget it. He demonstrates this thesis under the headings of six of the seven deadly sins, carefully including human examples as well. We are animals, we must eat other living things to survive, and like them we want to maximise the odds that our DNA will be passed on by the next generation. Quoting Dawkins brilliant insight, Riskin reminds us that we are machines whose function is to ensure the survival of the DNA that constructs us.
    So what does it matter that we experience love and kindness and joy, and yearn for justice and truth and beauty? These emotions are merely part of the mechanism that guarantees that we will make babies, along with the other emotions that guarantee that we will try to survive long enough to make sure our babies can make babies too.
     That’s the bleak vision Riskin arrives at when he gets to pride, which is a peculiarly human sin. It makes us oblivious of our connection to and participation in the natural world of competition for every possible scrap of advantage. But turn this pride inside out: Instead of being proud of ability to change other creatures to our advantage, we should be proud of our ability to change ourselves to our advantage. We are capable of doing something that other animals can’t do, which is to plan for the long-range future, and curb and redirect those behaviours that give us immediate, short-term advantages over each other and other animals. That, says Riskin, is something to be proud of. We can refuse to be slaves to our DNA.  Evolution produced us, but it also made us capable of defying its process. Or more humbly, to take advantage of its processes to enable the survival of our DNA not only in the next generation, but in the  generations after that. With luck and savvy, and a huge dollop of rethinking of our purposes, maybe for thousands of generations into the future.
     A book worth reading on many levels. Riskin has a sense of humour, he writes well, and he knows how to present examples that not only teach but also entertain. ***