First Lines of Liberrman and Long's "The Molecule of More"

 "Dopamine was discovered in the brain in 1957 by Kathleen Montagu, a researcher working in a laboratory at the Runwell Hospital near London. Initially, dopamine was seen simply as a way for the body to produce a chemical called norepinephrine, which is what adrenaline is called when it is found in the brain. But then then scientists began to observe strange things. Only 0.0005 percent of brain cells produce dopamine--one in two million--yet those cells appeared to exert an outsized influence on behavior."

- Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long, The Molecule of More

Dispelling the Dread and Darkness

"This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts of the day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature."

- Lucretius

The Mysterious

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

- Albert Einstein

Book Review: Issac Asimov's "Foundation"

Foundation, the first novel in Issac Asimov’s famous Foundation series, speculates how to use a scientific sociology (here called “psychohistory”) to predict (and control) future events. As with most of Asimov’s writing, the prose is frequently leaden, but this is secondary to the ideas and plot. Indeed, the whole fun of this book is seeing how Hari Seldon’s plans to reduce a coming “galactic dark age” from 30 millenniums down to one plays out on an epic scale. And it is fun seeing Seldon's original hints and insinuations come to fruition, even if I didn't find it as engaging during my second reading. Still, I've read a fair amount of epic “space operas” since Foundation and very few of them stack up to the original. Recommended.

Extraordinary Claims

"What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

- Carl Sagan

The New "Cosmos"

This looks cool: Neil deGrasse Tyson's update of Carl Segan's famous Cosmos TV show. My impression is that since the show is going to be on Fox - and produced by the Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane - it will be a show more for the masses than perhaps it was before (being originally shown on PBS). deGrasse Tyson isn't always my cup of tea - he can be a bit abrasive and clown-like (at least in his StarTalk Radio show) - but he knows his science cold, and has an amazing voice one could listen to all day.

Frozen Light

Now this is cool:

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.
It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned. Accordingly, it could allow for more secure quantum communications over longer distances.
Needless to say, halting light is not easy — you can't just put in the freezer. Light is electromagnetic radiation that moves at 300 million meters per second. Over the course of a one minute span, it can travel about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon. So it's a rather wily and slippery medium, to say the least.

More details here. Makes the quantum computers in Kim Stanley Robinson's work sound that much less outlandish!

Tab Dump (as Seen on TV!)

Check out these amazing pictures from A Brief History of Children’s Picture Books and the Art of Visual Storytelling - some amazing pictures here.

The Kinks are one of the best rock bands of all time, and were fueled by the tension between brothers Ray and Dave Davies. We've heard Ray's story, now we can see Dave's side in this documentary.

Is S&M anti-feminist? Um... no.

A good primer on reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Dear SciFi writers, please stop being so pessimistic.

On the subject of Stephenson, here's a fun examination of how relevant his dreams of a data haven are today. BTW, if you haven't read Cryptonomicon, what are you waiting for?

A good video explaining why "global warming" is a misnomer and explaining why yes, climate change means that your average situation may get more extreme. "The wet get wetter and the dry get drier"

Everything you need to know about culture in 10 books

A great Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson at Capitola Book Café in 2012

In other KSR news, the quantum computers that he predicted in his books (specifically in 2312) is one step closer to reality. Money quote:

The D-Wave machine, which its makers say makes use of such unusual properties of quantum physics as a particle’s ability to move in one direction and its opposite at the same time. ... While quantum properties are among the most tested and proven domains of physics, the concepts behind them — for example, suggestions that we live in one of many universes, or that objects not in direct contact can affect each other — make such properties hard to accept.
Harnessing them for the sake of computation, suggested as a possibility more than two decades ago, has proved difficult.
The optimization problem is typically something like how a traveling salesman would plan a complicated trip most effectively. Ms. McGeoch tested three problems involving optimization. In two of them, the D-Wave computer was slightly faster. In the third, it was markedly faster.

Read the whole thing. It's just fascinating.

Along those lines, Quantum Foam is just a cool thing to ponder.

Comics:

• Fun drawings of the Avengers as sailors
• This is what feminine superheroes should really look like, not the balloon-boobed ones currently out there.

My first introduction to Jack Gilbert's excellent poem "Failing and Flying"

Take the time to see the beauty in boredom.

A New Yorker report on the light pollution epidemic and an analysis of how Tucson, AZ of all places solves the problem:

Tucson’s code limits the brightness of exterior fixtures and requires most of them to be of a type usually known as “full cutoff” or “fully shielded,” meaning that they cast no light above the horizontal plane and employ a light source that cannot be seen by someone standing to the side. These are not necessarily more difficult or expensive to manufacture than traditional lights, and they typically cost less to operate. Calgary, Alberta, recently cut its electricity expenditures by more than two million dollars a year, by switching to full-cutoff, reduced-wattage street lights.

A fun, old-school Aphex Twin video interview from 1996

Fractals in Nature

These pictures are awesome.

Best of Luck!

A belated congratulations to my Mom and Father-in-law for the sale of Microcheck, their microbial analysis company, to  ATS Labs. The two of them poured everything they had into the company, and are now looking to enjoying a retirement in Florida.

Art and Science as Two Entirely Different Things

"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things... That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers."

- Isaac Asimov

Warp Speed, Mr. Sulu

Space.com gives nerds everywhere hope: perhaps warp speed isn't impossible after all:

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all. 

I love reading about developments like this - it makes me happy to know that there are still irrational dreamers out there. My understanding is that travel in this way is impossible, but i'm glad someone is trying nonetheless. Although I had to laugh at the vague “exotic matter” reference: I'd like to know what kind of exotic matter could protect someone from a distortion in space/time!

Sublimity From the Silence of the Night

“At the dead hour of the night, when the world is hushed in sleep and all is still; when there is not a sound to be heard save the dead beat escapement of the clock, counting with hollow voice the footsteps of time in ceaseless round, I turn to the Ephemeris and find there, by calculations made years ago, that when that clock tells a certain hour, a star which I never saw will be in the field of the telescope for a moment, flit through and then disappear. The instrument is set; the moment approaches and is intently awaited—I look—the star mute with eloquence that gathers sublimity from the silence of the night, comes smiling and dancing into the field, and at the instant predicted even to the fraction of a second, it makes its transit and is gone. With emotions too deep for the organs of speech, the heart swells out with unutterable anthems; we then see that there is harmony in the heavens above; and though we cannot hear, we feel the ‘music of the spheres.’”

— Matthew Fontaine Maury, in an 1849 presentation to the Virginia Historical Society. Maury was superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

H/t Boing Boing

Book Review: Brian Greene's "Hidden Reality"

The sub-title of Brian Greene's Hidden Reality is "Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos."  It's advertised as an accessible examination of the physics behind parallel universes (both the multiverse and the many-worlds theory of Quantum physics). The subject it covers is fascinating, if complex: Greene details nine actual theories that detail the existence of other universes in addition to the one we know and love. The most basic of these theories claims that if the universe is infinate, since there's only a finate number of ways that you can arrange matter, then logically patterns of matter would repeat, leading - somewhere out there - to duplication of our universe. The more complex of the theories rely on very abstract theoritical frameworks like the probability of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. For another taste of this, get it straight from the man himself:


Greene is a good writer, and does his best to simplify the science behind these complicated theories However, it's a daunting task: string theory in particular is so abstract and antithetical to our everyday life that it's very hard to follow - particularly if you're reading the book in segments. For example, here's an interview where he attempts to explain the brane multiverse:

...the brane multiverse, in which our universe is envisioned to reside on a giant membrane, an ingredient that comes out of string theory. It’s actually a three-dimensional membrane, but thinking in two-dimensional terms is easier. Think of our universe as if it were a huge slice of bread, with all the stars and all the galaxies sprinkled across its surface. The math of string theory suggests this picture, along with the possibility that there are other universes, other slices of bread, all constituting a big cosmic loaf.  

In the book, he expands upon the three-dimensional idea by stating that "...few of us can picture two coexisting but separate three-dimensional entities, each of which could fully fill three-dimensional space." (page 130) His loaf analogy is a nice attempt, but he has to keep revisiting it whenever new details arise, until the whole thing gets incredibly complicated - just like the theory. For that reason, I can't recommend this book to the layman; it's just not an easy-to-grasp, high-level explanation of the concepts behind parallel worlds. It is an interesting book on a fascinating subject, but in my opinion it couldn't get over the hump that simply grasping the meaning of theoretical physics can be difficult, much less following them to their logical conclusion.

Note for the Kindle edition: I found the footnotes and graphics to be problematic, mainly because you can't jump back to where you were without making note of the page number and manually entering it in. Would it really be that hard to make the footnote a two-way street? Also: there was obviously no color in the graphics. These two factors combined made me wish I had purchased the dead-tree edition of this book.

Watching "Sight"

This short video has really stuck with me in the few days since I've seen it. Really did a great job depicting what life might be like with embedded technology bringing virtual information into every moment of your life. Also: killer ending!

I'd Like an Order of Higgs Boson with a Side of Particle Physics

I tend to get obsessed about things. Sometimes it’s music, other times it’s fiction authors. At the moment, it’s Science Fiction and the science underlying it. And, as luck would have it, this obsession happens to coinside with current events: as you may have heard, the fine scientists in in Geneva, Switzerland operating the Large Hadron Collider have discovered evidence of a Higgs boson particle.

So what the hell is a Higgs boson particle? Here’s my attempt to decyper it in my own words so I can figure it out for myself. To start off, physics has a Standard Model, which dictates how subatomic particles interact with each other. This model has proven to be remarkably accurate, and most of the particles mentioned in it have been proven to exist: all but the Higgs boson. Discovering this particle would fill in the last gap in the model.

So how did they prove that it exists? It's absurdly complicated, but Bad Astronomy has a good summary:

“This particle is very hard to detect, because it doesn’t live long. Once it forms it decays in a burst of energy and other particles (think of them as shrapnel) extremely rapidly. The only way to make them is to smash other particles together at incredibly high energies, and look at the resulting collisions. If the Higgs exists, then it will decay and give off a characteristic bit of energy. The problem is, lots of things give off that much energy, so you have to see the Higgs signal on top of all that noise.
So, you have to collide particles over and over again, countless times, to build up that tiny signal from the Higgs decay. The more you do it, the bigger the signal gets, and the more confident you can be that the detection is real.”

So it’s a particle and was really, really difficult to find.Why is it so important? Well, in addition to confirmation that the Standard Model is accurate, the HB particle proves the existence of the Higgs field. So what's that? The Higgs field is a ginormous field permeating space that controls how all particles have mass. What, you ask? I thought that mass was a measure of the amount of "stuff" that a particle contains? So did I - it's what I was taught in school. But counter to this belief, it turns out that particles implicitly have no mass; any mass that they exhibit is a result of them interacting with the Higgs field (through the Higgs boson). The more a particle interacts with the field, the more mass it has. Some particles fly through the field and have little mass, some are dragged down by the field and have more mass. Now that we know how much mass the Higgs boson has, we can use this solid foundation as a basis to continue exploration into other aspects of physics (although what exactly they may be is unclear to me.)

In the end, regardless of all of the other details, the short story of all this is that mankind has just created and measured the heaviest and most unstable (its mass starts to decay right after its appearance) subatomic particle ever seen by man. Pretty cool stuff!

Quantum Biology

Boing Boing points out that some bacterium can convert 95% of the sunlight that hits them into energy. How? Possibly because of quantum physics:

Why can't we use the Sun's energy as effectively as bacteria can? The secret may be that the bacteria are using quantum physics to transmit energy. It's sort of like the bacteria have a method for keeping boxes of energy from falling off the truck during transport.

Worlds Greatest Mycologist

My father-in-law is quoted extensively in this article about Microcheck, the biology company he owns with my mother. The company is being profiled in "The World’s Greatest!..." TV show sometime in June, and i'm looking forward to watching it!

Flip the Pole!

I didn't know this:

The Sun essentially sheds its current magnetic field and regrows a new one every 11 years.

But this time around, it's different:

The Sun’s magnetic field is reversing, South becoming North, as it does approximately every 11 years on a cycle, but this time, something even stranger is going on: The North is moving much faster than the South, and space scientists aren’t sure why.

“Right now, there’s an imbalance between the north and the south poles,” Jonathan Cirtain, NASA’s project scientist for a Japanese solar mission called Hinode, in a recent article on NASA’s website. “The north is already in transition, well ahead of the south pole, and we don’t understand why.”

First Lines of The Hidden Reality

"Maybe... the familiar notion that any given experiment has one and only one outcome is flawed. The mathematics underlying quantum mechanics - or at least, one perspective on the math - suggests that all possible outcomes happen, each inhabiting its own separate universe. If a quantum calculation predicts that a particle might be here, or it might be there, than in one universe it is here, and in another it is there."

- The Hidden Reality, Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene.

So it's not really the first lines of the book. But they are the most fascinating ones in the introduction and the first chapter.