David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "science"

Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, argues that the mind is a computational computer. He uses Darwin's concept of reverse engineering to show how most of man's mental and emotional traits evolved.

Pinker also shows how the mind was designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their hunter/gatherer existence, which may be why we have such trouble explaining such esoteric concepts as consciousness and sentience.

Pinker does not have a whole lot of respect for Freud, B.F. Skinner, or the Standard Social Science Model, which views the mind as a blank slate at birth. He disdains a moral approach when discussing natural selection, which gets him in trouble with feminists among other value-laden "isms". Instead, he argues for a "module-packed mind" that "allows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innate motives that can avert them."

When discussing the computational mind, Pinker spends a lot of time on the eye. He shows how the eye evolved from light sensitive skin tissue, how humans developed stereoscopic vision leading to a bigger brain, how the brain tricks us into believing that matter is solid, and how seeing in color and in three dimensions led to more brain capacity. Pinker even shows us how the "Mind's eye" works. The eye connects to the brain, but the brain also connects to the eye.

Emotions began with the family and extended to non-family because foragers lived in groups. We love people who carry our genes. Pinker shows how the emotions evolve from the family to non-family relationships using reciprocal altruism. If you grant a favor to another (such as supplying him with meat) and he later returns the favor, you like him. If he cares for you when you are sick with no apparent compensation, you grow to love him. Cheaters inspire other emotions such as anger and resentment and the list grows. Guilt happens when we're cheating and we know it. Sympathy is an emotion for gaining gratitude. Body language ensures that emotions are hard to fake. Most people have scam detectors; you can tell the difference between a real smile and that of a beauty contestant.

Pinker also discusses bi-products of natural selection such as religion, music, philosophy and art. As mentioned earlier, we are blessed (or cursed) with a forager's brain. "The intellect evolved to crack the defense of things in the natural and social world," not answer such questions as "Why do bad things happen to good people?" We are lucky our stone-age minds do as well as they do when tackling complex scientific problems.

Michio Kaku's discussion of PARALLEL WORLDS results from physicists' attempts to reconcile Einstein's Theory of Relativity with that of quantum mechanics to form a "theory of everything." M-Theory, the newest form of string theory, allows for the possibility of a parallel universe no more than a millimeter from ours. Kaku believes the newest super collider, which should be ready in 2007, may reveal evidence pointing to this alternate universe.

Another theory, Alan Guth's inflationary universe theory, argues that the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light (possible because this was empty space that was expanding) and that the antigravity force which caused this original Big Bang still exists, allowing for more explosions, more inflation, and multi-universes.

Also, if we apply the quantum theory to the universe, we are forced to admit that the universe, like an electron, may exist simultaneously in many states.

Kaku asks the question, "What might these alternate universes look like?" Kaku theorizes that each time a new universe sprouts off from the original the physical laws change, creating entirely new realities. All of this gets even stranger when Kaku projects that all possible quantum worlds might exist simultaneously.

The author does not shy away from controversial issues, such as the Designer Universe. At one point he compares the likelihood of our world occurring by accident to a "Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard."

PARALLEL WORLDS really gets interesting when Kaku discusses Nikolai Kardashev's classification of civilizations according to energy output. Type I would have harnessed planetary forms of energy. Type II would be able to consume the energy output of its star and might even be able to ignite neutron stars. Type III has colonized large portions of its home galaxy and is able to use the energy from ten billion stars. Earth is a rather primitive civilization in contrast. Kaku states that if we reach Type I civilization it may launch a time of "unparalleled peace and prosperity." But that's a big if, considering the greenhouse effect, pollutin, nuclear war, fundamentalism and disease.

Kaku ends his book with a theological discussion of sorts. "If all possible universes exist, what's the point?" he asks. In a quantum universe, parallel selves would exist in parallel universes, with "different life histories and different destinies." Kaku believes that if string theory is eventually confirmed, providing a theory of everything, one must ask where the equation came from.

The author ends on a high note, seeing this as the most momentous time in human history, a time of transition to a type I civilization, a true paradise on Earth, if we can overcome our self-destructive natures.

Veblen Amundsen-Howda was named after Thorstein Veblen early twentieth century author of THE LEISURE CLASS. He despised corporations, materialism, and the American consumer class who seemed to be suckers for every new contraption conjured up by the above.

Veblen, the woman, is a temp worker who also translates Norwegian for a group determined to promote the old world culture to the diaspora who immigrated, primarily to the United States. Veblen is a quirky sort; she talks to squirrels for one thing. She likes to type, even when a typewriter isn't available. When she moved to Palo Alto she converted a run-down hovel into a nice little cottage doing all the remodeling herself. Her mother. She is plagued by her mother, Melanie, who is the epitome of hypochondria. She also has an ex-husband who suffers from PTS whom Veblen is trying to get to know.

Veblen is in love with Dr. Paul Vreeland a researcher who thinks he's invented a device that will help field medics deal with brain injuries, at least stop the swelling. But he's made the mistake of hooking up with Clovis Hutmacher, a lead executive at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Paul wants to do testing on cadavers and volunteers; Clovis wants to get the product into production as soon as possible.

Paul has family problems, too. His parents are former hippies; he has an older brother, Justin, who, coincidentally, also suffers from a brain injury. Paul thinks Justin has them wound around his little finger and is smarter than he looks. He uses his handicap to torture Paul.

The squirrel has taken up residence in Veblen's attic. It keeps Paul awake at night. Paul tries to catch it with a humane trap, but apparently it's too smart for him.

So . . . we have a number of conflicts going on here: family versus potential spouse, unethical pharmaceutical companies trying to take advantage of a somewhat naive inventer and an engaged couple who aren't quite sure what they're getting into or even if they really want to.

As in many modern novels everybody, including the squirrel, gets a point of view, and we bounce from Veblen to Paul to Melanie to Clovis. I think it would have been a better book if Veblen narrated the whole thing. As is it needs editing badly, but I do like it, primarily because Thorstein Veblen, who should be a modern progressive hero, is mentioned and quoted periodically, along with a brief biography.

In order to get the most out of Crouch's DARK MATTER, the reader should be familiar with String theory or M theory. A good source might be Michio Kaku's PARALLEL WORLDS, in which he posits the possibility of parallel universes.

But this is fiction, so it seems a little extreme at moments when all the Jason Dresson clones start popping up, in search of his wife Daniela and his son, Charlie. Jason Dresson was a brilliant scientist who was working on this cube-like device that would allow people to enter a box and visit parallel worlds, where they'd find themselves living a different life. Jason's big decision was to marry Daniela and give up his super star status as the next Einstein. He chose the life of a physics professor and Daniela, while his friend, Brian Holder, got the scientific accolades. Even Brian feels Jason was the one who should've received the awards. Jason attends a celebration for Brian; on his way home, he's kidnapped and wakes up battered and blue in another universe. He's a hero there because he's the first to return from an episode inside the box. But he escapes, visits his former home where he lived with Daniela and Charlie, but everything is a bit off. It smells like loneliness and everything is a bit too ritzy for a college professor.

Eventually Jason finds out he was kidnapped by himself, a man he calls Jason 2, who made the opposite decision he made on Earth. He chose the scientific career and invented the multi-universe box, but then he observed Jason 1's life in Chicago with Daniela and Charlie and was jealous. So . . . he took Jason's place.

In Jason's new world Daniela is a famous artist. He has a romantic interlude with her, but she's not HIS Daniela. The leaders in Jason new world are willing to do anything to keep the box, including pulling a Darth Cheney on Jason; you know the torture route. Amanda, one of the aides feels sorry for him, helps him enter the box, and they begin to open doors. They find places that are too cold, other places that are suffering from a deadly pestilence. Finally they realize that you have to be in the right frame of mind to find the world you're after, but something is always just a little bit off. I'll let you read the book to find out how Jason finds his original home.

There's not enough science in this book. If you've never heard of String Theory, you'll think it's not even good science fiction. As I said above, other Jasons start to show up looking for Daniela. There are hundreds of them, and they seen to anticipate Jason 1's every move. They're terrible people. They're willing to kill to get what they want. They kill each other; one would think they'd retain some of Jason 1's basic goodness, which Daniela fell in love with.

I have never had it clearly explained to me, not even after reading Kaku, why a version of ourselves would exist in these other universes. I understand that there may have been more than one Big Bang or maybe lots of them, which would explain the parallel universes, but why would we exist in these places as president of the United States or head of a giant corporation or maybe even as a member of the opposite sex or a homeless person. If you can think of it, it exists on another planet in another universe. Don't scoff. The mathematical formula works. Einstein worked his entire career to find a theory of everything, which made the macroverse (the solar systems, the stars, the galaxies) and the microverse (atoms, protons, quarks) jive. He never found it, but String Theory seems to explain them both, only with ten dimensions (in some versions) seven we can't see.

ASTROPHYSICS for PE0PLE in HURRY certainly is short and sweet. I was hoping for something on the Super Collider and the discovery of the God Particle. Tyson alludes to it but doesn't go into any depth.

He does discuss Dark Matter and Dark Energy to an extent, but only to say that we don't know what it is. He suggests that it may have to do with gravity from a parallel universe, but that's pretty much it.

About the most interesting tidbits concern how light came to be, and why we won't be able to see what the universe looked like before 380,000 years after the Big Bang. You see, during those years photons were always crashing into electrons. After the 380,000 year mark, photons before to escape, leaving kind of a background fog; not enough photons had escaped, and they hadn't mated with electrons and protons to form atoms as of yet. This fog is called the Cosmic Microwave Background.

There's another section on moons, asteroids and comets that's pretty interesting. The moon escaped from the Earth's crust or was the Earth's crust at the time. We have a tidal lock with the moon, meaning you can only see one side of the moon anyplace on the planet. Jupiter's moons are the most interesting. There's one, Europa, that has liquid water beneath its frozen surface. Perhaps we might want to go there if we blow ourselves up, but we'll have to remember to wear our union suits. Tyson also says there are thousands of asteroids in the Kuiper belt, and they're always crossing the Earth's path around the Sun. One of them killed the dinosaurs, which was rather helpful because the little mammals who survived were our ancestors. The dinosaurs would've eaten us. I almost forgot. Tyson is quite proud one of the asteroids is named after him.

The last chapter is about why we should care more about the cosmos. It will take quite a stretch for us to reach the nearest possible Goldilocks planet. He says things like: “The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics.” It also makes us feel small, even insignificant, but so far we're the only self aware, fairly intelligent beings that we know of, so that's something to celebrate.

BTW, you space obsessed geeks out there who think we will eventually be able to go back in time should forget it. Tyson says that violates the law of causality, which is universal throughout the universe. Maybe this universe, but what if quantum mechanics is right about parallel universes. They say, “If you can imagine it, it's possible on some other universe.”

I've been a long-time fan of “Bones” on TV. I've seen Kathy Reichs mentioned as the author of the books on which the series was based. I hadn't realized she also writes some of the scripts.

The Temperance of the TV series is as different from the original as night and day. In the books she's also a forensic anthropologist, but she works in Canada and North Carolina. She also has several ex-boyfriends. One of them, Detective Ryan, is a major player in BONES ARE FOREVER. The TV Temperance would never let a man know she cares about him, unless he's Booth. The original can't seem to help herself. She's also not as vain and conceited. Some might say Temperance, the TV character, is only stating a fact, but she is somewhat off-putting.

Unforgivably there are no “Squints” in BONES ARE FOREVER. Love them. The original character is also more willing to get out into the field on her own. I don't remember her being in the field without Booth, the FBI agent, in the TV series.

This book is about dead babies. A woman turns up at a hospital, bleeding from her nether regions. She's obviously just had a baby, but when Temperance has been called in to offer her expertise on a dead baby, and she and the detective identify the woman, who has several aliases, as the mother. A forensic test reveals she may be Native America. During the investigation they find two more dead babies traced to the same woman. She has a record as a prostitute.

The story then moves to Edmonton, where Ryan and Temperance team up with a sergeant in the RCMP; there's sexual tension between Temperance and Ollie, too. And they find another dead baby.

The plot then takes a twist. Adults are turning up dead, including relatives of the prostitute. And the whole thing involves diamond mining. I didn't even know there were diamonds in Canada, the Northwest Territory, specifically.

There's no doubt there's more characterization in the TV series, and minor characters “The Squints” and other lab technicians play a much larger role. The Reichs series is much more traditional mystery series, except for the main character's occupation, which Reichs also claims.

About seventy-five thousand years ago, a volcanic eruption nearly ended the human race; almost everything died. About two thousand humans survived. As a result two chimpanzees have more genetic variation than all human beings combined; we differ by .01 of a percent. And this wasn't the only time the Earth was almost destroyed. Most everyone knows about how the dinosaurs disappeared.

So . . . why are we here? According to Michio Kaku Jupiter is our guardian angel, deflecting most asteroids, comets and other space clutter that could kill us. Earth is a “Goldilocks Planet”, not too hot, not cold, with an atmosphere that's no too dense and a magnetic field and an ozone layer that deflects ultra-violet rays from frying us alive. How many “Goldilocks planets are there in our galaxy? Possibly hundreds of thousands, but a lot depends on plane old luck. We have been lucky. Just last year an asteroid came within a thirty-some thousand miles of the Earth.

How do scientists know which planets are like us? They can't see them, but the Kepler and the Hubble telescopes look at the brightness of certain stars; when they dim in a certain way, it means something is blocking their light. Scientists are able to tell the size of the planet by how much it affects the light from its host star.

Kaku discusses the effect of Obama's decision to shut down the shuttle program. He was hoping private business would get involved, and they have in a big way. Elon Musk has a billion dollar contract to provision the international space station, and he has delivered supplies several times. He is planning a Mars landing by 2024; he already has a rocket whose booster can land on an ocean platform. This rocket can take us to Mars. NASA isn't quite that optimistic. They plan to put a man on Mars by 2035, using the moon as a base.

Stephen J. Hawking maintains that if we can make it through the next two hundred years and not destroy ourselves via terrorism and nuclear war or pollution we can evolve in respect to reaching the stars. A Russian scientist, Nikolai Kardashev has created a scale of civilizations: Type I uses all of the energy from the light provided by its star; Type II uses all the energy the sun produces (think fusion); Type III uses all the energy in the entire galaxy. Obviously we're not even a Type I civilization since we don't use all the sunlight the Sun provides. We're about a 0.7 civilization.

If we survive it's pretty much a given we'll have a settlement on Mars by mid century and we'll start terraforming it. It's too cold up there with hardly any atmosphere. We can warm it up by injecting methane into its atmosphere.

Scientists have also discovered several moons of Jupiter and Saturn that have water. We can use them as bases to move beyond the solar system.

Eventually, Kaku gets around to his pet theory, string theory which mathematically combines Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory. It consists of ten dimensions, but we can't prove it until we become a Type III civilization. We can chip away at it, using the Super colliders, the CERN in Switzerland which has already discovered the Higgs Boson particle, an indicator of dark matter, and a new one being built by the Japanese in conjunction with other countries. String theory will help us discover what's inside a Worm Hole, whether or not we can pass through one without being crushed. Supposedly if we can pass through a Worm Hole, we can take a short cut to the opposite side of the galaxy. String Theory also allows for the possibility of multi universes. Kaku talks about universes “popping in and out of existence”. We're looking for the stable ones. Why? Because other galaxies are racing away from us at exponential speed. If this keeps up, we're in for a “Big Freeze” and everything will die. String theory allows for us to move not just to another star, but another universe. If you're the paranoid type, stop worrying. This won't happen for billions maybe trillions of years.