Not at the same time, of course. Some things should not be cooled to -320 degrees F, and nipples are probably one of them.

The Top Chef finale was last night. Unfortunately, I can't talk about it yet because Cris's cable was out due to the second round of tornadoes and flash flooding we've had in a week and I don't know if he's seen it yet. I *will*, however, say that my favorite contestant, Richard, once again tickled my molecular gastronomy bone by incorporating liquid nitrogen into his cooking (yay for cool gadgets and high-tech ingredients), in this case to make a flash-frozen ice cream. The idea is pretty simple; assemble your non-frozen ice cream ingredients (in his case bacon-flavored ice cream, which did not particularly impress me; his original idea for tabasco pepper ice cream sounded better), put them in a high-grade mixer (like my KitchenAid), turn the mixer on low and slowly add liquid nitrogen until the concoction is ice cream (observing all due safety precautions, of course). Nitrogen is inert and boils out, leaving only the original, now-frozen ingredients. Lane has encouraged me to try it (with her present, of course), and liquid nitrogen can be had without permits or the like (it's not a regulated gas). The limiting factor is finding a place that will sell it to you in small quantities (most gas supply stores sell in bulk and I don't really need 30 liters of the stuff, since it doesn't store). I haven't found one in Omaha yet. Maybe someday.

On the nudity end of the spectrum (Do spectrums really have nudity ends? Is there a chocolate end?), the Transportation Security Administration rolled out its first full-use backscatter airport security machines this week. I first heard about these years ago in a Discover Magazine article (because they use a unique form of X-ray that measures object density by how much the object "scatters" the radiation rather than how it absorbs and re-releases it), where the focus was on the science rather than the politics. Now that they're in use, expect to hear about them in the news, because they produce near-photo-quality black-and-white images of the subject's nude body, regardless of clothing (clothing scatters almost none of the radiation so it doesn't show up). In an attempt to address privacy concerns, early versions of the machines had software that blurred out private areas, but apparently the TSA has decided that blurring those areas will encourage terrorists to hide items there, because the machines delivered to 10 airports this week "allow the security screeners . . . to clearly see the passenger's sexual organs." The TSA's press release assures people that there is no way for the screener to make a copy of the image, and the software still blurs the subject's face, but they're still getting a "show."

The defense offered to make the machines easier to swallow is phrased in the form of options. You can still request a physical pat-down in place of the machine, and the idea is that the machine is less physically invasive. I can see from my own personal standpoint that I would prefer the machine to having a stranger's hands on me, but then I'm not particularly uptight about images of the nude body (even my own), given my photography portfolio. It remains to be seen how most people, especially women and parents of pre-teen children, react, and how the actual security setup is handled (the procedure would likely be more palatable if the person viewing the images is in a different room and cannot see the subject, making it more impersonal, and the screener and subject are matched up by gender the way physical pat-downs are). I imagine it's only a matter of time before there's a scandal of some sort involving an overzealous screener; stay tuned.

Labels: cooking, politics, science, social commentary, television

I've come to expect very little from science reporting in mainstream news, but occasionally I'm particularly repulsed. This little tidbit of front-page Yahoo! information, complete with standard-fare kitschy 1960s Star Trek puns that scientifically illiterate journalists still think are creative, induced waves of bile-tainted frustration. "Distant galaxies"? Please. Just because it has the cool word "antimatter" in the article? Did we bother to do any research at all? A matter-antimatter engine (no, not science fiction) is extremely efficient and far, far faster than our chemical-based rockets. It is *not*, however, capable of anything even remotely close to the speed of light. So we can slash the time it takes to reach Mars from a year to a month. That's hardly "distant galaxies" material. Our own galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. At the speed of light (something this engine can't even come anywhere near), it would take, yes, 100,000 years to travel across it. It would take another 2.5 million years to reach the nearest major galaxy (the Andromeda Galaxy), again, at the speed of light, and the trip to the most distant galaxies we've detected? Thirteen billion light years.

Science reporters should be required to take some science classes. My god.

Labels: annoyance, science, what the hell

I finished Discover's Einstein-dedicated March issue a few months ago. It included numerous articles about his life, his learning years, his teaching environment, his family and his children. It did not, however, contain anything like this:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this . . . For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

Labels: humanism, religion and atheism, science, social commentary

Lisa and I were talking about galaxy collisions last night (or perhaps more accurately, I was talking about galaxy collisions and Lisa was politely nodding, 'cause I'm a geek), specifically the impending (in 3 billion years or so) conjugation of the Andromeda galaxy with our own. And almost on cue NASA releases some Hubble images showcasing merging galaxies (fantastic pictures, really).

Labels: science, wonder

But a February 2006 investigation by ABC's "Good Morning America" found Airborne might not work as advertised. The investigation revealed that Airborne's clinical trial was conducted by just two people in the absence of a clinic or scientists.

Yay for preying on the gullibility of the average American!

Labels: science, social commentary

-The lunar eclipse last night was pretty spectacular. Too bad it coincided with a typical Nebraska night in February. I tried taking some pictures out a window in my house, but I'm afraid the warm air escaping into the freezing dark may not have been the best photographic situation (they're still on the camera; no need to look for the missing link in this paragraph).

-This week's Tales of the Twins(tm): *Scott takes away Kylie's water cup* Kylie: "Why the hell did you do that? I not making a mess." There's something about two-year-olds swearing that's inherently wrong and yet engenders laughter all the same.

-"Dexter" is a fabulous show. I might have more to say about it later. If I can come up with a passable way of drawing parallels between my psyche and the main character's without giving off the creepy "wow, he might be a serial killer" vibe.

Labels: miscellany, science, twins

Multiverses, not just for fun and fiction anymore.

(Actually, this isn't really "news." The multiverse theories have been around for awhile. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has been around since at least the sixties, and I first read about it in the late nineties when I read some of the works of David Deutsch. I was just amused to see it make Yahoo's news page.)

Labels: entertainment, quantum mechanics, science

Certain acquaintances, primarily family, like to tease me now and then about my dietary habits, specifically my avoidance of red meat, seeing it, as they do, as a facet of my liberal tendencies or my general "oddness" rather than a health choice. I direct them now to this study, which correlates their teasing, to a lesser and less obvious degree, to teasing nonsmokers about not smoking.

Labels: science, social commentary

Bits and pieces from my week:

- An article in the most recent Discover announced that a team in England successfully extracted stem cells from adult bone marrow and coaxed them into becoming sperm cells. Some biologists are dubious the process would ever work, but it opens the door to, in order from least- to most-questionable by society, infertile men having children, two women having children (always girls, as women don't carry a Y-chromosome) and one woman having children using her own eggs and stem cells. I'd already read that the number of men needed to maintain the species is a shockingly low 100; perhaps in the not-too-distant future the number will be zero.

- Another article on the physical composition of the Universe reminded me of why I love science, and why I'm banned from talking about it in certain places (some guys hear "I have a headache" in relation to sex; I hear it when I'm talking about quantum indeterminacy). Everything we can see, the entire Earth, the sun, all the stars, every comet, asteroid, gas cloud, planet and black hole, everything we can see through a telescope or detect with instruments, makes up a practically minuscule 4% of the Universe (that's not a typo). Another 23% or so, and most of the actual mass of the Universe, is something called dark matter, a substance we can't see but can only infer from its gravitational effects on galaxies. The majority of the Universe, on the other hand, almost three-quarters of everything, is an even more mysterious "stuff" called dark energy, a force that fuels the expansion of the Universe. It sounds like science fiction, I know.

- Thanks to an intriguing episode of Doctor Who (titled, to Lane's delight, "42"), I'm now familiar with the concept of "happy numbers." I doubt I'll ever be able to incorporate them into anything practical, but they're still interesting. (42, I'm afraid, is not happy, Lane.)

Labels: science, wonder

This is pretty slick. I wonder if there will be a freeware version to view on your home computer.

Labels: science, wonder

NPR carried a story on hypermilers (people who modify their driving habits to improve, sometimes dramatically, their fuel economy) on a segment last week. The program hosts even interviewed a man who claims to average 90 mpg on a routine basis. The incredibly impressive results in the program are only attainable with a hybrid, of course, but the interviewee mentioned that the tips work for any vehicle (he used the example of an SUV that averages 12 mpg today getting 18 mpg next week with the right preparation). Tricks for forcing a hybrid engine to "glide" during driving aside, the most basic advice is unsurprisingly common sense: frequent maintenance to take advantage of proper tire pressures and fresh oil, avoiding rapid acceleration and breaking, planning trips with the least number of stops and starts, etc.

The arrival of another pilgrimage over the weekend presented an opportunity to experiment with some of these ideas (spurred at least in part by a jump in gas prices to $3.25 the day before the departure, although to be honest my fuel economy is decent enough anyway that the experimentation was more out of curiosity, as most good experimentation is). I had an oil change and basic maintenance two days before the trip, and then I intentionally drove 60 mph (well below the 75-mph limit) the entire trip. The results:

- The most obvious was an additional two hours of driving. The trip, one way, is about 380 miles, so what was normally an 11-hour round trip ended up being closer to 13.

- The trip was far more "relaxed." It's difficult to describe, but there was a certain Zen quality to it, perhaps spurred by an acceptance that the goal was something other than maximizing time (and aided by a subconscious inner smugness toward the other drivers, much like listening to a snippet of drama from a group of high schoolers and then inwardly chuckling at how inconsequential their concerns are in the grand scheme).

- Adding to the "relaxed" atmosphere was the fact that I didn't have to use my turn signals or stress about traffic. In fact, I didn't pass a single car and never had to leave my lane. (As a corollary, I imagine there were drivers cursing at the "slow idiot," but that had little immediate impact on me personally.)

- The most important result, however, was the jump in fuel economy. The segments from Omaha to Oshkosh and from Oshkosh back as far as North Platte averaged almost 41 mpg, a nearly 25% jump over my trip-standard 32 mpg. My number from North Platte back to Omaha came to 50.1 mpg, a number I'd be inclined to find dubious if I didn't have the gas receipts (that last leg was after dark, making the air conditioner unnecessary, and I did the final 60 miles at 55 mph, which may have been responsible for the extra boost).

By my rough estimations, given current gas prices, I traded two hours of driving for around $25. Many people would find that trade something less than worthwhile, but since I was in no hurry I'm happy to take the money and the reduced environmental impact. Perhaps a new tao will emerge from this, along the therapeutic lines of "Zen and the Art of Hypermiling," offering respite from road rage and aggressive driving by releaving the pressure of the destination.

Labels: amusement, environment, NPR, science

Two hypothetical questions from a recent Discover article:

1. Suppose a train is traveling down a track toward a junction. If the train continues on its course, it will run over and kill five people. You happen to be standing by the switch. If you throw it, the train will follow a different track, where it will run over and kill one person. Do you throw the switch?

2. You are a doctor at a hospital. A nurse comes to you and says "We have five patients with severe organ failure who will die before we can receive transplant organs. A patient is sitting in the waiting room with a broken arm but no other injuries. If we kill him and take his organs, we can save the other five patients. Can we do that?" Do you say "Yes"?

According to the article, despite the fact that the practical results are the same (saving five lives at the expense of one life), most people who answer these questions in surveys will say "yes" to the first one and "no" to the second with little hesitation, and most of them are unable to explain why.

The article interviews Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser about the ideas he puts forth in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, which suggests that, just as Noam Chomsky suggested we have an innate, evolution-supplied intuition for language, we also have an innate, evolution-supplied intuition for morality. To support his idea, Hauser points out that in survey questions like those above, people tend to choose the same answers, instinctively, without regard to education or religious background (as he puts it, people from religious and nonreligious backgrounds answer "one hundred percent . . . so far, exactly the same . . . certain aspects of our moral intuitions seem to be immune to such experience [as religion and education level]"), and he talks about studies that show that children younger than 3 can distinguish between a social convention and a moral rule ("raise your hand before you speak" vs. "punch the child next to you").

I found the comparison to language a good analogy. As anyone who has asked my opinion on grammar rules and English classes knows, I've long held that language is intuitive rather than conscious (when we speak, we don't think "okay, I need a verb after this noun"; we just talk). I amuse people now and then when I mention I have an English degree and I get paid to be a proofreader, but I can't name all the parts of speech or cite the various grammar rules, primarily because I learned them after I'd already learned the language and I had no reason to remember them any longer than it took to pass the English tests. Hauser suggests that, similarly, we have an intuitive morality that operates on an unconscious level that influences our decision-making. Like the capacity for language, this capacity can be expressed through a cultural lens (he compares the alienness of gender-specific nouns in French to native English speakers with the alienness of honor killings to western society), but the basic codes are hardwired, the result of millions of years of natural selection that forced our ancestors to make instant decisions about complex social interactions with others.

He goes on to note that our intuitive moral decision-making does not always control our actual actions; it's quite common for people to make a moral judgment about something and then ignore it. But the initial reaction seems to be unconsciously directed.

Labels: science, social commentary

Very cool. Although the higher gravity and lack of rotation might affect the selling price.

Labels: science, wonder

I read an article yesterday on this device, an ancient Greek analog computer that calculated star and planetary positions using a complex system of perhaps as many as 37 differential gears (a mechanical concept believed until the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism to have been devised in the 16th century). It's delightfully ingenious and complex and far outshines anything built by any culture after the Greeks for at least a thousand years, if not until the Renaissance itself. Wow.

The article led me to think about the huge gap between the accomplishments of the Greek culture and the rediscovery (independently or based on recovered Greek manuscripts) of that learning almost 2,000 years later. Of course, saying "the Greeks were brilliant" based on a handful of very brilliant men is comparable to saying "Americans are brilliant" because Einstein formulated relativity theory; the clarification of terminology, however, doesn't lessen the accomplishments of specific Greek citizens. Ignoring, for the sake of brevity and not out of lack of appreciation, the Greek advancements in politics, literature, history, geography and ethics, and assuming familiarity with the accomplishments of such notable names as Aristotle and Archimedes, I present the following points of advanced science that were first pioneered by Greek luminaries and subsequently lost for the duration of the Dark Ages:

-Eratosthenes not only knew the earth was a sphere, but calculated its circumference to a degree of accuracy not surpassed until fairly modern times (his result: approx. 25,000 miles; actual result: 24,901).

-Democritus proposed the idea that matter was made up of atoms, bits that varied in size and were in constant motion and could be combined together in different combinations to make different kinds of matter, a concept that wouldn't be proven for thousands of years.

-Aristarchus of Samos devised a heliocentric model of the solar system almost 2,000 years before Copernicus and calculated the distance from the Earth to the sun.

-Hipparchus accurately calculated the distance from the Earth to the moon and described the orbital motions of the sun and moon.

-Euclid became the father of geometry with the publication of his "Elements," one of the cornerstones of modern mathematics and second only to the Bible in number of editions published after the invention of the printing press.

Labels: science

Because I'm being remiss if I go more than a few months without mentioning Schrodinger's Cat, ya know.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

The follow up to the original video that inspired a previous lesson in chemistry.

Labels: diet coke and mentos, funny, science

Caring, responsible uncles provide their charges with toys that incorporate the wonders of science, ya know. Although I suppose the twins have to develop language beyond "shoes" and "puppy" before I can explain how ionizing a low-pressure gas creates plasma.

Labels: photography, science, twins

This thing is just incredible. A species that can survive being boiled at 300 degrees F for minutes or frozen to just above absolute zero (-460 degrees F) for days, can withstand more than a thousand times the level of X-ray radiation that would kill a human and can survive at extremely high pressures and in vacuum. They can go into a state of suspended animation where their body functions at 0.01% of normal functioning and can dehydrate to 1% of their normal water content and then reanimate a decade later. Wow.

Labels: science

Following up on a post from a year ago, I present a museum display (finally) and the expected controversy surrounding it. It seems appropriate following National Coming Out Day (the display, not the controversy).

Labels: science, social commentary

From a promo for an upcoming SciFi show:

Scientist meant to impress us all in a soundbyte: "This thing is billions of years old . . . but light-years beyond our technology."

Okay, science fiction writers. Repeat after me. "Years" measures time. "Light-years," despite the misleading root words, measures distance. Stop mixing the two. :P

Labels: amusement, annoyance, science

Closely following the demotion of Pluto to non-planet status (or "dwarf planet" status, if you prefer), the object once nicknamed "Xena" now has an official name. Behold, Eris, the personification of strife! As has been repeatedly noted, it seems appropriate to name the object that caused so much disagreement on planetary status after a goddess with the same characteristics. (Personally, I thought they'd go with Persephone, but I was unaware there's already an asteroid with that name.)

Labels: science

Little attempt has been made to disguise my love of science. From my early experiments in grade school making hydrogen out of zinc canning lids and battery acid to my entire freshman undergrad year of chemistry and physics classes, science has always fascinated me. And regular readers of my blog know about the posts on quantum mechanics and four-dimensional visualization . . .

Despite all this, I'm a bystander. I'm well-versed in many science topics, but it's all academic. I can explain gene therapy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I haven't done any hands-on experimentation or verification, which in a way is a shame. On the other hand, I laughed this week when I realized that at one point I was subconsciously analyzing and formulating in much the way early scientists did. I brought my solar engine to my office and put it in my window a few weeks ago. I've had this one for a couple of years, and my dad had one when I was a kid, so I was familiar with the concept of the solar engine and how it worked, at least according to the pamphlet that came with it in the box (which I read and "absorbed" when I was like 9). Essentially, the rotor in the near-vacuum bulb rotates because sunlight bounces off the white panels while being absorbed by the black panels, and thus the rotor gets a "push" from light. Piece of cake.

Until I stopped, puzzled, one day this week as I watched it from my desk. It was spinning *the wrong way.* It was spinning as though the light was pushing on the black side and being absorbed by the white side. I actually stopped it and let it start over, with the same result. Then, confused, I cheated and looked it up online (where I discovered the explanation in the box is wrong, and has been known to be wrong since 1876 - bad science-illiterate companies! No cookies for you!). There was no way I was going to come up with the concept of "thermal transpiration" (the real explanation) on my own, so I don't feel so bad about looking it up; I'm just amused that the curiosity and problem-solving mentality that I used to toss around with reckless abandon in my childhood still surfaces from time to time.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Wooo! A quantum computer chip now officially exists (and yes, Lisa, it employs a particle that exists in two states at the same time . . . until you look at it). On to quantum computers!

(To clarify the above comment to Lisa for everyone else, Lisa *hates* Schrodinger's Cat, the classic thought paradox involving quantum indeterminacy. She's actually told me to "shut up about the damn cat" and plugs her ears every time I mention it.) ;)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

The World-Herald's final commentary on its editorial page today (the "official opinion" of the paper, as it were) earns a D for science education. While ridiculing government spending on "useless" projects, it references a San Francisco Chronicle article on a $25,000 report commissioned by the Air Force on teleportation. Then it repeats the tired "Beam me up, Scotty!" line that is printed over and over again any time teleportation is mentioned outside science fiction or physics conferences, closing with "Just who's kidding whom here?" I actually found the report, and it is indeed largely nonsense (with sections on teleporting macro-sized objects (i.e., people), which according to current theory is impossible, as well as "psychic teleportation), but the paper also references quantum teleportation, which is a well-known and demonstrated property of quantum mechanics. It's not science fiction, and is going to be a strong component of cryptography and computing in the near future. It's unfair to dismiss actual science out of hand because the name conjures up bad 60s science fiction special effects.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

At work tonight, while slogging through a document that definitely fell into the vaguely defined "unfun" category, I abruptly decided that I need a computer that can ignore temporal mechanics and access information from the past and future as well as the present. That way, I could just download the completed document from tomorrow and print it out. Then I realized that would create several nasty paradoxes (since technically no one would actually finish the document, it couldn't actually exist - damn grandfather paradox). Rather than abandon the prospect, however, I decided to incorporate the elements of the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum theory, which postulates the creation of a new, parallel universe every time a quantum event occurs. So all I need is a quantum computer capable of accessing computer data from the same computer in a closely aligned parallel universe (and of course in the future); then I can download a copy of the completed document that an alternate me did. Then I decided that if I was going to do that anyway, why limit it to being lazy at work? Why not go ahead and download all the novels I'm going to write (which isn't nearly as dishonest as downloading unpublished future novels by other authors, 'cause I, or a version thereof, wrote them - can you steal from yourself?). Then I got to thinking about "stealing from yourself" and wondered if any of the alternate "me"s had the same idea (likely, especially since all of the alternate "me"s created after I had the idea would also have the idea by default), which made me wonder if any of them happened to live in a world where it was already possible, which brought up the possibility that an alternate me is already downloading the stuff I wrote. So listen up, alternate "me"s: I want royalties. :P Just leave a copy of something that will make me a millionaire in the C:\Temp\Alternate Reality\ folder I just created while you're downloading other stuff. Quid pro quo.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

What is reality?

Certainly something far too complex to sum up in a blog entry, but I was ruminating on it today after rewatching Identity (which I'm going to spoil, in case you haven't seen it) last night and reading an article on string theory in Discover today. These obviously aren't directly related (one is a fictional movie centering around mental illness and the other is a nonfictional accounting of the most current description of our universe), but in both cases they deal with the concept of reality being something other than what you can see. It's a classic case of the "brain in a vat" idea, which considers that, since what we perceive as "reality" is an interpretation of the sensory input directed to our brains, it's entirely possible for that input to be faked or misinterpreted so that what we see as reality is an illusion (The Matrix is the most popular pop culture reference to this).

In Identity (I warned you that I'm going to spoil it . . .), the main characters, portrayed as people stuck at a motel during a heavy rain storm, turn out to be the personalities constructed by a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder. The characters each believe they are real people and have complete histories and distinct personalities and goals, but are in fact constructs. When one of the personalities is informed by a psychiatrist that everything he believes is false and that he has not led the life he remembers, he at first acts with disbelief and then anger, as any of us would if we suddenly woke up in the body of a stranger and were told that everything we've experienced up to this point was a fantasy constructed by the stranger. It raises questions about whether the created personality is "real," whether we, if in that situation, could handle that knowledge and return to the fantasy world and whether our perception of ourselves would change if we knew ourselves to be an illusion. Are we really ourselves, or are we the personalities of a single individual? Are we the avatars in a massive Sims-like video game, interpreting our controllers' commands as our own free will? Are we snippets of code in some advanced computer simulation, programmed by scientists to think of ourselves as sentient and human as part of an experiment? Are we the dream of a slumbering consciousness, waiting to wink out of existence when our host awakens? And if any of these are true, how would we know? And would we want to know?

String theory assumes that what we see is real, of course. But it also postulates that what we don't see is just as real. More particularly, that our knowledge of the universe is so small as to be laughable, that the three spatial dimensions we perceive are only a subset of the 10 that exist, that the majority of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy that we can't see, only infer, and that our universe, as grand as it is, is just one of an infinite number floating in an 11-dimensional ocean. It faces a dilemma similar to the brain in a vat: we can infer much of the theory from pure mathematics, but very little of it can be experimentally determined. The scale on which much of string theory works (we're talking billionths the size of atoms) is so small that it's impossible to "see" (if only because we see by bouncing photons off an object) and nearly impossible to detect, and we lack the technology to test the parts of the theories that deal with higher dimensions. Not only that, but we lack the mental facilities to visualize the parts that deal with higher dimensions. We interpret reality through three spatial dimensions; asking us to visualize four spatial dimensions loses everyone but those mentally brilliant or mentally insane, and 10 is simply out of the question. What is clear is that "reality" as most people think of it is radically different from what it is, and we're only seeing a very small piece of it.

These are topics that actually excite me. I spent 40 minutes online tonight, hopping from article to article in Wikipedia exploring concepts of quantum mechanics, starting with the Casimir Effect, then jumping to quantum foam, zero-point energy and wave-particle duality before ending up with quantum entanglement. Who needs breasts when you have the fabric of reality to entertain you? ;)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Living on a Balloon

Warning: Long post about geeky cosmology stuff. Skip it if you're not into that.

Amanda and I had a delightful discussion of the shape of the universe on Saturday, a topic near and dear to my heart, even though I know next to nothing about it (compared to actual scientists, anyway; I know more than 99% of average citizens). I actually have been trying to wrap my head around the intricacies of universal topology off and on for about a year now and failing miserably, a result of the difficulties inherent in three-dimensional beings attempting to visualize four-dimension space, in much the same way that we would have difficulty explaining the concept of a sphere to a two-dimensional being. Part of my problem is that we (the collective "we," including scientists) don't know what the shape of the universe is, although there are various models, including one I read about last night that posits the universe as a trumpet bell with an infinitely long spire protruding from the narrow end of the bell.

That aside, I was taught an analogy for our universe that may have tripped me up. We know that all galaxies are traveling away from each other, which seems counterintuitive: if you have a group of 10 people standing in a random pattern on a gym floor and they start moving they will have to travel closer to some people in order to travel further away from others (except for the people on the edges, but we're not counting those). It's possible, though, for all of them to move away from all the others if they stand still and the gym floor itself expands outward in all directions, which is a very rough analogy of the expansion of the universe. I learned this analogy using a balloon speckled with marker dots: as the balloon is inflated and grows larger, all of the dots (representing galaxies) travel away from each other and get farther apart. For awhile I had some vague picture of the expanding universe that troubled me because, like the people standing on the edge of the crowd in the above example, it seemed to me that there would be galaxies "out in front" of the expansion, which created the odd situation (in my mind) of a planet that had stars on only half of the night sky. That seemed intriguing but highly unlikely (especially considering I'd never heard anyone else mention it), so I gave it up and went to the balloon analogy, which I think I took too far.

With the balloon analogy, there is no galaxy "out in front" because the surface is spherical. The point of inflation aside (and not relevant to the discussion), an expanding balloon has no "singular important point," that is, all points on the balloon are as equal and important as all other points (there are no edges or "beginnings"). This is a more palatable model, although it created for me another problem: if you start at a point on the balloon and travel away from that point, in any direction, you eventually arrive back at that point. For awhile I just assumed that the model looked different in four dimensions and I wasn't visualizing it correctly. But then I read an article asking whether the universe is "multiply connected" (a term I hadn't heard before) that specifically mentions a universe with just such characteristics (although the universe is so large that it would take many times the lifetime of the universe to travel its circumference).

The article also mentioned a possible characteristic of such a universe that I hadn't considered (but that excited me - yes, cosmology excites me; are you surprised I'm single?). In such a universe (one shaped like a balloon), the light from a star would continue traveling around and around and around that universe, setting up the possibility that our universe is much smaller than it appears and all of the trillions of stars and galaxies are actually a much smaller number of stars and galaxies seen multiple times (like an object reflected in the mirrors of a fun house) during different times of their development. This creates the possibility of peering out into the night sky and seeing our own galaxy/system/planet in its earlier development. Alas, the same article says this is highly unlikely, but it's still an interesting concept (I need to work that into a book somewhere).

That underscores the point that the stars we see in the night sky aren't the way they are now; we're actually peering into the past by however many years the light from the star has been traveling before it reached us, in some cases billions and billions of years. If we could travel faster than light, we could pop out to 10 light years, peer back at Earth and see how things were 10 years ago (by "intercepting" the light traveling away from Earth). It also means that any signals we might ever receive from other planets may be from worlds that died millions of years ago. And 10 billion years from now, a planet that is currently 10 billion light years from Earth may be watching reruns of "Baywatch."

Anyway, where was I? Um, yeah, shape of the universe. I dunno what it is (I guess I'll do some more reading). I've read several suggested models, but reading them and understanding them are two different things (bloody extra dimensions). Parting shot: this topic reminded me of Olbers' Paradox (something I'd read about years ago and then forgotten). Olbers' Paradox puts forth the question "if the universe contains an infinite or near-infinite number of stars, every line of site from Earth should, eventually, end on the surface of a star, causing the night sky to shine brightly; why, therefore, is it dark?" The common solution to the paradox is that, because stars didn't start forming until billions of years after the Big Bang (after the universe had expanded to a great size), many galaxies are so far away from us that the light from their stars hasn't reached us yet (which at first implied to me that eventually the night sky will be one big bright light, but I guess the more likely solution is that the stars nearer to us will die out and go dark by the time the light from the distant galaxies reaches us; this, of course, happening billions of years in the future, long after we're gone).

Wow, that was a lot of rambling. Yay for geeks. :)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Crunchless

More evidence that the Universe is going to continue to expand forever, eventually growing cold and dark as the stars die out rather than ending in a cataclysmic "Big Crunch." Very sad. Of course, our planet will have been incinerated a few billion years before that . . .

Labels: science

Is It Thursday or Friday?

My schedule is so odd that sometimes it's hard to tell. For me it's still Thursday, but the clock says Friday (albeit very early Friday). When I'm on my normal (non-driving-impaired) schedule, I don't actually get off work until just into the next day, but alas they still only pay me for one day at a time. Speaking of work, it was busy tonight, far busier than normal (which I actually don't mind - job security and all that, you know). It did keep me from catching up on my reading like I did last night. I finished off my latest Discover magazine, which had some really good articles this month. One in particular on amorphous metals that I found absolutely fascinating (amorphous metals are alloys that lack a crystalline structure and as a consequence can be twice as strong as titanium and possess a variety of other interesting traits, such as being made into a "foam" that's 99% air).

Another on the blossoming field of neuroethics, or the science of brain biology's effects on ethical decisions. One of the main points in that article was the concept that the way our neural pathways form makes it very difficult for us to "look outside the box" regarding an opinion that we have already formed. As a result, in a debate or argument, we automatically think that the person with the opposing viewpoint is stupid or willfully ignorant of what we view as an obvious truth, but in reality the other person actually may not be capable of stepping outside his/her viewpoint due to neurological reasons (and the same for us). Humans will rationalize out flaws and holes in our arguments to absurd lengths rather than abandon a strongly held opinion, due to, according to the authors, our brain structure. The study's authors backed it up with MRI scans and test data, but the field is in its infancy so I'm going to withhold judgment. Although, in my debates with other opinionated people, I've seen people deadlock the way the article describes (which is why there are certain people with whom I simply will not debate), I also know that my own personal opinions changed almost 180 degrees during and right after college, to the point where I want to go back and smack my 20-year-old self for defending a point of view that I now find distasteful (and in retrospect I can clearly see the flaws in the arguments that my 20-year-old self offered, but my 20-year-old self couldn't). So maybe the theory needs more work, or maybe I'm just one of the rare people who can "look outside the box" and change viewpoints after adulthood. In any case, I really enjoyed the issue. Of course, I also enjoyed the article on the ekpyrotic theory of the Universe and its relation with quantum mechanics. Yes, I'm a science geek.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science