Pythagoras, the first dude to call himself a philosopher, is best known to kids as the guy who came up with that theorem about the squares of the sides of a right triangle adding up to square of the hypotenuse. (He also was the first to get the mathematics behind musical harmony.) In fact, he didn't just dig numbers, but pretty much worshiped them as the basis of everything. (He especially thought the numbers one, two, three and four were special, adding up to 10 and how cool is that? To him, very.)
But what I had not known is that according to some accounts, after traveling to Egypt and learning a bunch of applied mathematics, he ended up as a teacher in India, where he became a revered leader of a sect-like thing that continued, big time, after he returned to Mediterranean. While in India, he was much influenced by Jainism, an ascetic offshoot of Hinduism that was particularly put off by that religion's rituals, particularly its sacrificial cults. (Jainism later suffered its own schism over such matters as whether believers need to be nude all the time. But Jainism had, and has, its cool aspects. For instance, believers were known to carry brooms as they walked in order to safely sweep away insects so they weren't stepped on. Modern-day Jains, some 2 million in number, support charities that pay for asylums for diseased and decrepit animals. One can think of worse religions.)
Anyway, Pythagoras' fixation on numbers was rather prescient. After all, Einstein's most important equation (not counting that good old e=mc2), is the one that describes the curvature of space on the left side of the equal sign and the mass and energy content on the right side. I don't know to reproduce it here, but it is, after all, a bunch of numbers. How cool is that?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Early thought
Some say philosophy began with the myths that have come down to us - myths from the Upanishads or from Homer that dealt with the same philosophical concerns that linger today: How and what do we - can we - know? How should we conduct our lives? How should we arrange our way of living together?
But of course philosophy goes a lot farther back than that. I picture a stone-age hunter-gatherer clan sitting around a fire in their leisure time, which was a big part of their day, and glancing up at the brilliant stars. (Very little light pollution back then.) Some first philosopher, perhaps a young guy who was a little geeky with the atlatl but was an introspective sort, closed his eyes to the unreachable splendor above, deep in thought.
"Is this all there is?" he pondered, unknowingly doing a Peggy Lee. "What does it all mean?
"And, what's with that dark energy?"
But of course philosophy goes a lot farther back than that. I picture a stone-age hunter-gatherer clan sitting around a fire in their leisure time, which was a big part of their day, and glancing up at the brilliant stars. (Very little light pollution back then.) Some first philosopher, perhaps a young guy who was a little geeky with the atlatl but was an introspective sort, closed his eyes to the unreachable splendor above, deep in thought.
"Is this all there is?" he pondered, unknowingly doing a Peggy Lee. "What does it all mean?
"And, what's with that dark energy?"
Monday, February 8, 2010
Verbal coolness
Today I finished a rather thick and kind-of-deep-but-with-few-equations book called "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." Cool speculation at the end!
In the epilogue, in an endnote, the author, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, said the title came to him easily because it worked on all kinds of levels ... including Deborah Kerr on the beach!
But he also mentioned that when his book was still in manuscript, nearly completed, another book was published with the same main title: "From Eternity to Here." Of course, the subtitle was a bit different: "Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God."
"I do hope," said Carroll in the endnote, "nobody orders the wrong book by accident."
Sometimes, you just have to sit back in awe, admiring a person's verbal coolness.
In the epilogue, in an endnote, the author, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, said the title came to him easily because it worked on all kinds of levels ... including Deborah Kerr on the beach!
But he also mentioned that when his book was still in manuscript, nearly completed, another book was published with the same main title: "From Eternity to Here." Of course, the subtitle was a bit different: "Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God."
"I do hope," said Carroll in the endnote, "nobody orders the wrong book by accident."
Sometimes, you just have to sit back in awe, admiring a person's verbal coolness.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Fuzz and football
The notion of locality - the idea that cause and effect only works when the cause somehow "bumps into" something, causing the effect - is tricky. (Say you didn't watch the Super Bowl, and so you have no idea that the Saints won. But you come across a friend - a big Saints fan - and by seeing his big grin you know instantly which team won the game. Is that weird in any way? Nope - it took news of the outcome and the sight of his smile well longer to get to you than the time the information would have traveled at the speed of light. After all, it had to go from the game to him via TV to you via the smile. No "paradox."
But take a thought experiment (much cheaper than particle accelerators and such), and imagine (as did Einstein and a couple of his collaborators in the late 1930s) that you had two "entangled" subatomic particles, one of which spins in a certain way, and the other of which necessarily spins in the opposite way. (That's how these "entangled duos work.) In the thought experiment, you send one particle off into space really far - light years! - and then you check the other nearby one. Gosh, by checking the spin of the nearby one you automatically know the spin of the other one - information apparently delivered to you instantaneously, much faster that the speed of light! Old frizzy-hair Einstein figured that such a result was nuts, thus demolishing quantum mechanics.
Trouble is, the thought experiment didn't do the job. Most physicists bought what Albert called "spooky action at the distance." They showed that their experiments and their math agreed, to astonishing precision, and moved on.
Leaving the rest of us pissed. We can't do the math, the results still don't let anybody send information faster than light, and the whole thing is a pain. Especially when the whole idea undermines our intuition regarding the (sort-of) common-sense idea of space-time itself, making it fuzz up. Drat.
Luckily, we don't have to really worry about it. After all, the Saints won ... and given Katrina, that's a really good thing. Nothing fuzzy about that.
(My Packers, however, obviously need help.)
But take a thought experiment (much cheaper than particle accelerators and such), and imagine (as did Einstein and a couple of his collaborators in the late 1930s) that you had two "entangled" subatomic particles, one of which spins in a certain way, and the other of which necessarily spins in the opposite way. (That's how these "entangled duos work.) In the thought experiment, you send one particle off into space really far - light years! - and then you check the other nearby one. Gosh, by checking the spin of the nearby one you automatically know the spin of the other one - information apparently delivered to you instantaneously, much faster that the speed of light! Old frizzy-hair Einstein figured that such a result was nuts, thus demolishing quantum mechanics.
Trouble is, the thought experiment didn't do the job. Most physicists bought what Albert called "spooky action at the distance." They showed that their experiments and their math agreed, to astonishing precision, and moved on.
Leaving the rest of us pissed. We can't do the math, the results still don't let anybody send information faster than light, and the whole thing is a pain. Especially when the whole idea undermines our intuition regarding the (sort-of) common-sense idea of space-time itself, making it fuzz up. Drat.
Luckily, we don't have to really worry about it. After all, the Saints won ... and given Katrina, that's a really good thing. Nothing fuzzy about that.
(My Packers, however, obviously need help.)
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Long odds
I'm still reading "From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time," and pondering big numbers - like the possible states of the universe in terms of entropy. When the Big Bang occurred, entropy had to be super low, or we'd all probably be a mindless part of a cooling soup of atomic particles by now.
So what are the odds that such a low-entropy beginning would happen? One measure answers: damn few among 10 (to the superscript 10) (to the supersuperscript 120). That is a number that makes a googol amount to a rather small hill of beans. Your odds of dying of a lightning strike while simultaneously being eaten by a lion and great white shark are far, far, better.
Some would say that such odds prove whatever religion they happen to believe in. But, hey, the odds of any of them being right - based on the superstitions of bronze-age tribes - is a lot less than that lion-shark-lightning demise. It turns out that our universe is a whole lot more unlikely than we can, at least today, even hope to imagine. It had, somehow, to have been physically chosen. But what does that mean? Our scientific thoughts on the matter may be tantalizingly close ... or not close at all.
But, hi! Here we are!
For a while, anyway.
So what are the odds that such a low-entropy beginning would happen? One measure answers: damn few among 10 (to the superscript 10) (to the supersuperscript 120). That is a number that makes a googol amount to a rather small hill of beans. Your odds of dying of a lightning strike while simultaneously being eaten by a lion and great white shark are far, far, better.
Some would say that such odds prove whatever religion they happen to believe in. But, hey, the odds of any of them being right - based on the superstitions of bronze-age tribes - is a lot less than that lion-shark-lightning demise. It turns out that our universe is a whole lot more unlikely than we can, at least today, even hope to imagine. It had, somehow, to have been physically chosen. But what does that mean? Our scientific thoughts on the matter may be tantalizingly close ... or not close at all.
But, hi! Here we are!
For a while, anyway.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Three guys walk into a bar
I was reading a popular-science physics book - the chapter on quantum mechanics - when this joke started to seep into my head, growing like an algae bloom across an otherwise placid pond.
"Three guys - call them Dave, Don, and Don's Dad - walk into a bar and start playing pool. Dad shoots a powerful shot toward a corner pocket. The object ball bounces off the two points of the pocket and rockets across the table, sinking into the opposite corner pocket.
Dad smiles knowingly, explaining that he wouldn't have had to shoot that kind of difficult shot except for quantum mechanics. You see, he told the others, had the superposition of the wave function of the balls on the table not been collapsed by being observed by Dave and Don, Dad would simply have been able to place the balls where he wanted them, unobserved.
After all, as Einstein said, God does not play pool with the universe.
A nearby fundamentalist religious dude overheard the conversation and aggressively asked Dad whether he was mocking God. "Oh, no," Dad said, he was only making fun of physics types like Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and the under-appreciated sage Wilhelm Clerk Skidmorsky. The dude says, "Skidmorsky?" "Oh yes," said Dad. "You mean you haven't heard of "Skidmorsky's mouse?"
Dad explained that the thought experiment involved a mouse placed in a box in which an apparatus had a 50-50 chance of killing it - unless the mouse gnawed through the apparatus first. Is the mouse alive or dead? The answer is: Both! At least until someone looks inside. (Unless, of course, the mouse has free gnaw.)
While Dave and Don were laughing uncontrollably, Dad quietly moved the balls into his preferred eigenstate."
---
Blame the joke on Sean Carroll, the author of "From Eternity to Here," the book I'm still reading. In that chapter on quantum mechanics, despite his heroic (and successful) striving to explain it all non-mathematically, he pauses to assure readers that: "No animals will be harmed in our thought experiments."
Heh.
"Three guys - call them Dave, Don, and Don's Dad - walk into a bar and start playing pool. Dad shoots a powerful shot toward a corner pocket. The object ball bounces off the two points of the pocket and rockets across the table, sinking into the opposite corner pocket.
Dad smiles knowingly, explaining that he wouldn't have had to shoot that kind of difficult shot except for quantum mechanics. You see, he told the others, had the superposition of the wave function of the balls on the table not been collapsed by being observed by Dave and Don, Dad would simply have been able to place the balls where he wanted them, unobserved.
After all, as Einstein said, God does not play pool with the universe.
A nearby fundamentalist religious dude overheard the conversation and aggressively asked Dad whether he was mocking God. "Oh, no," Dad said, he was only making fun of physics types like Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and the under-appreciated sage Wilhelm Clerk Skidmorsky. The dude says, "Skidmorsky?" "Oh yes," said Dad. "You mean you haven't heard of "Skidmorsky's mouse?"
Dad explained that the thought experiment involved a mouse placed in a box in which an apparatus had a 50-50 chance of killing it - unless the mouse gnawed through the apparatus first. Is the mouse alive or dead? The answer is: Both! At least until someone looks inside. (Unless, of course, the mouse has free gnaw.)
While Dave and Don were laughing uncontrollably, Dad quietly moved the balls into his preferred eigenstate."
---
Blame the joke on Sean Carroll, the author of "From Eternity to Here," the book I'm still reading. In that chapter on quantum mechanics, despite his heroic (and successful) striving to explain it all non-mathematically, he pauses to assure readers that: "No animals will be harmed in our thought experiments."
Heh.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A cool journalist
Among my journalistic heroes are not only investigative reporters like Woodward-Bernstein, but also a handful of columnists able to combine uncommon writing skills with uncommon good sense. (You'll search today's editorial pages - don't bother looking on the tube - long and hard to find that kind of combo in operation these days.
One of the best of those columnists was Anna Quindlen, a long-time New York Times writer who gave up her post in mid life to write rather good novels. But in recent years, spurred on I suppose by her inner pundit, she's returned to occasional column writing. An excellent case in point is her lead item in this week's Newsweek.
Paraphrasing Quindlen is almost like paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address or the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. You don't do it at your peril, but at your certain failure.
Still, despite how impressed I was with the opinion piece, I'm not about to type in a column you can find on the newsstand or the Internet. Instead, some bullets:
- Most everybody is bummed about health-care reform - either those who didn't want it at all because of ingrained ideological blather, or those who, like me, demanded a hell of a lot more. As Quindlen noted, a poll of voters who abandoned the Democrats in Massachusetts showed that 41 percent of them who opposed the current health-care plan weren't sure why they were against it. Quindlen: "If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they're going to need ordinary people to be better than that."
- Her suggestion is that Democrats "are in the majority, and they should act like it - boldly, decisively. Let the Republicans filibuster, and be confident that the sight would irritate, then enrage, most of the American people." We forget, she said, that "most the things that make America great - civil rights, the safety net, social security - were pushed through despite their unpopularity."
- Quindlen recalled a "smart" politician who said that "Telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do." That was Obama, of course, and it is a good part of why he was elected. Do we ever need him to be true to that campaign position.
One of the best of those columnists was Anna Quindlen, a long-time New York Times writer who gave up her post in mid life to write rather good novels. But in recent years, spurred on I suppose by her inner pundit, she's returned to occasional column writing. An excellent case in point is her lead item in this week's Newsweek.
Paraphrasing Quindlen is almost like paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address or the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. You don't do it at your peril, but at your certain failure.
Still, despite how impressed I was with the opinion piece, I'm not about to type in a column you can find on the newsstand or the Internet. Instead, some bullets:
- Most everybody is bummed about health-care reform - either those who didn't want it at all because of ingrained ideological blather, or those who, like me, demanded a hell of a lot more. As Quindlen noted, a poll of voters who abandoned the Democrats in Massachusetts showed that 41 percent of them who opposed the current health-care plan weren't sure why they were against it. Quindlen: "If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they're going to need ordinary people to be better than that."
- Her suggestion is that Democrats "are in the majority, and they should act like it - boldly, decisively. Let the Republicans filibuster, and be confident that the sight would irritate, then enrage, most of the American people." We forget, she said, that "most the things that make America great - civil rights, the safety net, social security - were pushed through despite their unpopularity."
- Quindlen recalled a "smart" politician who said that "Telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do." That was Obama, of course, and it is a good part of why he was elected. Do we ever need him to be true to that campaign position.
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