The butterfly of doubt
So I’ve been a right lazy butt over break so far, blogging wise, which you might have noticed, what with the lack of posts and all. So let’s start off 2012 slowly, and simply ponder a quote from one of my favorite novels:
In the rain-forests of Brutha’s subconscious the butterfly of doubt emerged and flapped an experimental wing, all unaware of what chaos theory has to to say about this sort of thing…
– Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Which, frankly, is about as neat a description of skepticism, and how it works within you, as I’ve ever seen. As a rule I’m leery of anyone who claims Road to Damascus kinds of experiences. I suspect, at the least, delusion and self-deception; at the worst, bull shit being piled high. Human minds simply don’t work that way. We hold onto our ideas, give them up only reluctantly. Presented with contrary ideas, or with evidence that our ideas are wrong, we circle the wagons.
It takes a long time for those first seeds to take root and pry up a bit of the pavement in your brain. The blinding flash on the road is only the moment when you become aware of what has already happened.
The fun, of course, is that following those little butterflies, when they emerge, can be extraordinary. The journey is hard, and painful, and will remind you every step of the way what a limited being you are, as a human; yet it is chrysalis, something new born. Niggling doubts and questions took us from living in caves to landing men on the Moon, from pitiful superstitions about human origins to the discovery of evolution. Those tiny, tiny thoughts, those doubts that pop up and refuse to go away, are our greatest gift.
Which, I think, serves as a good theme for this blog, going forward.
The vampires of physics
You heard it, folks: Neutrinos are the vampires of Physics. Find out why:
Luckily, the Buffy Boson will destroy them, so that’s okay.
(Yeah, I taint got nuttin’ for ya tonight. Rainy day, been playing games and being a bum. Sue me)
(and subscribe to One Minute Physics — it’s a gas, and educational to boot!)
Saturday Linkage 12/10/11
Final on Monday, so please excuse the linky post. This one has a bit of a theme, namely SCIENCE. More importantly, how to think about science.
Real Science vs. Fake Science: How can you tell them apart?
A great little guide to how to approach claims, and the warning signs that something is fishy. (Also: excellent blog title)
Do Vaccines contain toxic chemicals?
What does “Toxic” really mean?
A twofer from Puff The Mutant Dragon that is very, very much Must Reading Material. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about vaccines trying to scare the hell out of you. In this case, a quick primer in some very basic Chemistry can show you how messed up it all actually is. (also: excellent blog title)
Brian Greene: The Fabric of the Cosmos
And last, but not least, 4 hours of Must Watching: if you didn’t catch it this past month, go watch Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos now. 2011, folks, has been a stellar* year for great TV about Cosmology, thanks to the Brians: Greene with this series, and the amazing Brian Cox with Wonders of the Universe. Simply put, we’ve been treated to the best stuff since Cosmos. (apologies to the overseas readers if it turns out viewing is blocked. I have no idea if PBS does that or not. Probably yes, given the insane, out of date licensing rules and laws and yada yada yada.)
*see what I did there?
Knowing the name of something vs. knowing something
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned early on the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
– Richard Feynman
This quote is now in my email signature. I love it because it so perfectly encapsulates what I’m after these days. For so long I played at being the Smart Guy, but really was just The King of Random Bits of Interesting Trivia Guy. I don’t want to just know how to name things. I want to understand a few of them, really understand them. To be able to do more than spout a few facts that I’ve gathered from people who had the real adventures.
In Calculus this semester, I’ve found myself perplexed at moments by the people who just want to memorize simple rules and apply them like robots. For me the greatest fun has been in the understanding. All those things you memorize in Calculus — standard derivatives, that sort of thing, such as the fact that cos x is the derivative of sin x — are the result of the most marvelous things going on “under the hood.” It’s often that stuff that makes me stay up to insane hours studying. I’m learning to understand. I’m coming to actually know something at last.
(p.s. If you notice the theme on this blog constantly changing, that’s because I’m playing around, trying to find one that really makes me happy. Which is hard at the moment, since I’m not entirely sure what I want).
Newtonmas Advent calendar and gross medicines of old!
Been mathing the living Math out of the Maths, so please forgive a linky post:
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day (by the Julian calendar, anyway), so Christmas is also Newtonmas. Celebrate Newtonmas with The Advent Calendar of Physics over at the excellent blog Uncertain Principles. Here’s the first three entries:
It’s great reading so far, and will give you some great insight into the beauty and majesty of some of these equations.
Now, if you’re in the mood for a gross-out, go read this: Drinking Blood and Eating Flesh: Corpse Medicine in Early Modern England. I wonder if Isaac Newton ever quaffed any blood to cure what ailed him?
Bye-bye, Curiosity
Work was long and exhausting (but good, for all that) and I’m going to kick back with The Miracle on 34th Street. In the meantime, enjoy this:
That’s Curiosity, off on its journey to Mars.
Nifty.
Cygnus X-1 and an age of wonders
You may not have heard of Cygnus X-1, but you should. It was the first, and still the single best, black hole candidate, its discovery dating to 1972. As you might imagine, it’s been studied quite a bit. But there was one small problem all these years — we didn’t know how far away it was.
That is, in case you’re wondering, a fairly common problem. Determining the distance to objects elsewhere in the galaxy or universe is what you might call a nontrivial problem. You may notice, when you look up stars in Wikipedia, say, that there will be big ranges given on distance and size. Without a good measure of the distance, our ability to gauge the size of an object is limited. There are stars in our galaxy that we know are big, but can’t be much more precise than “gosh, that’s pretty huge” because we don’t know the distance to the object.
As you can imagine, this must have been frustrating for astronomers when it came to Cygnus X-1 and its companion star. Without more precise ideas about the size of the star, and the size of the black hole, it was hard to learn much more. Luckily, we now have a much more precise estimate of its distance. This reveals some interesting things about the system — for instance, it’s unlikely that the black hole was formed in a supernova. But something else caught my attention.
Namely, how they did it.
They measured the trigonometric parallax as Earth moved about the Sun. What’s parallax? It’s the perceived difference in position of an object from different locations — the best known example is to look at a pencil with one eye open, and then with the other eye, and wooo! The pencil moves. Now, in this case, the slight change in angle is, well, slight.
Very, very slight:
Their parallax value of 0.539 ± 0.033 milliarcsecond yields a distance of 6,070 ±300 light-years, more than a threefold improvement.
(Emphasis mine)
If you’re asking what’s a milliarcsecond, well, it’s frickin’ tiny. That’s all you need to know. The fact that we have instruments that can measure with that kind of accuracy blows my mind. We humans seriously rock when we want to (aside: also let me say that, as someone planning on sciencey things in his future, engineers are kind of my heroes).
Also, just let yourself consider that error of +/- 300 light years. When you’ve got a science where that is a satisfying bit of accuracy, well, you know you’re dealing with some crazy huge numbers.
Social myths inside our heads
A missed day again, yoinks. This cold thing, folks, is slowly killing me. A slow, achy death, with mucus and a muffled ear. JOY. Actually a tiny bit better, but that’s what it feels like — tiny, tiny, tiny, Good health is the limit of the Cold as Virus approaches zero in tiny, tiny little increments…
Be that as it may, a blog post. Saw this delightful blog post shared by someone on Google+: Adventures in Polyamory. It’s a wonderful, warm account of polyamory, and thought-provoking as all heck.
What I love is how honest and open JT is about his feelings as he went through this experience, and how it exposes how social norms shape our thoughts. There’s so much that we take for granted as being true that we often never notice that is, in fact, nothing more than arbitrary social norms. Gender roles are a great example — ask anyone what a “man” is or what a “woman” is, and I guarantee that almost every single thing you hear will be nothing more than their culture’s norms about those categories. I also guarantee you that those people will mostly think that those are innate, a priori truths.
I’ve spent my entire life going up against this stuff, consciously and unconsciously. I am a guy. I am — at least mostly, I think — heterosexual. I am cisgendered. Just your typical guy, right? Only, I don’t really feel at home with a lot of what our culture defines as “male.” And frankly, I’ve spent far too many years — and fight it even now, when I’m more consciously aware and trying to embrace rationality! — feeling bad about how I fail to “make the grade.” There is still part of me that is the sad little boy inside, embarrassed and ashamed because I know I’m a “sissy.”
I look at my life, and realize how much of it has been ruled by those social norms, largely unconsidered. So many “facts,” and ones that often have made me miserable! So many myths, things that are nothing more than social constructs, ruling my thoughts and all too often making me hate myself.
Even with the idea of love — I’ve never really believed the usual construction we have. I have no doubt that some folks are quite happy to hook up with one other person for life. I know some of them! But I think human experience must be more varied than that, more creative. And right at the center of my being I get the idea that someone can love more than one person. Love, it seems to me, would be a pretty small and pathetic thing if it only worked between two people. In fact, it never does — we all love multiple people. It’s only romantic love that we fuck up with a ton of extra baggage, including our desperately messed up ideas about sex.
I really don’t know where I’m going with this — mostly, I’m embarking on a a lot of new voyage of discovery stuff for myself here. But it does strike that atheism and skepticism both are inherently radical stances. In the atheist community we often try to convey this image of “hey, we’re just like you, nothing freaky here!” to the outside world. Which can be true, but also isn’t. Because if you take it seriously, really get on board with the whole rational, skeptical inquiry thing, you end up here — looking hard at all those social constructs we are taught as “fact,” and hitting the realization that they are actually myth. There are both social and personal voyages there, and neither particularly easy — and both leading in wonderful new directions.
Sagan
Carl Sagan would have been 77 today.
This year I find Sagan Day particularly poignant, because I’ve finally taken the first tentative steps into a new, dizzy adventure, one that has its roots way back as a kid, watching Cosmos on TV. Through all those years, all the bad crap and the screw ups and the mental and emotional death, I never quite lost that — in a real sense, it is one of the things that kept me alive.
In 1997, during one of the darkest periods, I spent hours watching the updates from a little rover named Sojourner. Like many, I cried when they renamed Pathfinder to The Sagan Memorial Station. During that dark period, it was that breathtaking exploration, and the way that watching it kept those bigger, life-sustaining dreams alive in me, that kept me going.
And if you want to know why Carl Sagan is still the most important public thinker in shaping and guiding my thoughts, I’ll just point to this video. 30 seconds, so fast you might not even notice the profundity on display:
“But I can’t be sure, of course.”
Those are words that launch ships, and can fill a lifetime with meaningful exploration and learning.
Transcendence, secular style
Short post tonight, but just wanted to make sure everyone reads this wonderful post by Greta Christina:
Letting The World Surprise You
…since I now think that this life is the only one I’m ever going to have, I feel much more driven to experience it as fully and as richly as I possibly can. It is sometimes intensely frustrating to know that there are restaurants I’m never going to eat at, movies I’m never going to see, books I’m never going to read, people I’m never going to meet. But that makes me feel that much more passionate about really experiencing the restaurants and movies and books and people that are part of my life. It makes me feel that much more driven to stay present with them, to not space out and drift into my own little world, to connect with them and see what surprises they might have in store.
The simplest bit of wisdom I have picked up in life (from my very, very small store of wisdom!) is that there is nothing that is mundane. If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, as Carl Sagan noted, you must first invent the universe. Everything is a wonder, everything is amazing, simply because it is. Every person you meet, hell, every insect that dive bombs your face, is amazing, simply because they exist, instead of don’t exist; and because they exist because of an immense chain of events stretching back to the first event.
It says something about us, I think, that in the midst of such wonder we can become jaded.
