Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Venus in clouds over Nymphenberg

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Wow, what an iPhone can do. It can capture the crescent shape of the planet Venus in a sky still blue and pink and green with twilight.

And an iPhone can motivate Frank Wilczek to start taking photographs for just about the first time since I’ve known him.

You hear a lot about how new technology “empowers” people, but somehow when I hear that, I think of other people, people much less savvy than (ahem) we are.

I am really enjoying seeing more of the world through Frank Wilczek’s eyes now, including a photo of what I look like to him.

Though I wouldn’t have minded more photos of me in my twenties!

Happy New Year

Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

Pop, bam, fizz! Another New Year arrives, with fresh round of wild ideas from EDGE.org.

“What will change everything?” was John Brockman’s question this year. “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” He’s now posting responses given by more than 150 wide-angle guessers — people from actor Alan Alda to quantum teleportationist Anton Zeilinger — with Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine filing separate guesses.
“Homesteading in Hilbert space,” predicts Frank Wilczek:

…The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus’ Old New World. It is also, in a real sense, much bigger… Our fundamental equations do not live in the three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively) infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. It will take us much more than a century to homestead that New New World, even at today’s much-accelerated pace…

“Happiness,” counter-predicts Betsy Devine:

In the next five years, policy-makers around the world will embrace economic theories (e.g. those of Richard Layard) aimed at creating happiness. The Tower of Economic Babble is rubble. Long live the new, improved happiness economics! …

Here are other short samples from just a few more of the best:

“The robotic moment” says Sherry Turkle

I will see the development of robots that people will want to spend time with. Not just a little time, time in which the robots serve as amusements, but enough time and with enough interactivity that the robots will be experienced as companions, each closer to a someone than a something. I think of this as the robotic moment…

“A forebrain for the world mind” says Danny Hillis

…If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital…I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism’s own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient….

“Molecular manufacturing” says Ed Regis

…Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they’d do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they’d do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials. The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion…

“We are learning to make phenotypes” says Mark Pagel

…the thing that we think of as “us”,can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don’t suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced…

“Malthusian information famine” says Charles Seife

…There seems to be a Malthusian principle at work: information grows exponentially, but useful information grows only linearly. Noise will drown out signal. The moment that we, as a species, finally have the memory to store our every thought, etch our every experience into a digital medium, it will be hard to avoid slipping into a Borgesian nightmare where we are engulfed by our own mental refuse…

“The use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population” says Lawrence Krauss

…Having been forced to choose a single game changer, I have turned away from the fascinating scientific developments I might like to see, and will instead focus on the one game changer that I will hopefully never directly witness, but nevertheless expect will occur during my lifetime: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population…

I join Lawrence in hoping that his prediction won’t come true.

Jan and Franciszka Wilczek

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Frank Wilczek’s grandfather Jan Wilczek joined Haller’s Army in 1919 and served with them as a private until 1920, fighting first in Galicia and later on the Russian front. In honor of Grandpa Wilczek’s service, the Polish War Veterans in America gave Frank a beautiful bronze Paderewski medal last night. Frank’s uncle Walter Wilczek also shared in the honor.

Many thanks to the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America and to its hard-working president Thaddeus Gromada for organizing a remarkable evening of Polish surprises and to Poland’s Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk for hosting it. PIASA organized the event on the occasion of its own Casimir Funk Award for natural sciences, an honor first given to chemistry Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, who gave Frank his award last night.

Thanks also to the Association of Polish-American Engineers (Polonia Technica) and Poland’s National Academy for honoring Frank and the Wilczek family’s Warsaw-Galicia-and-other-Polish origins. In fact, thanks to everyone who made this evening so special.

There’s a longer translation of this document’s Polish on this photo’s Flickr page.

Brilliant film maker Jon Hotchkiss

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

From my email outbox:

Hey Alyse and Jon and Brad  ….

We saw Punkin Chunkin on Thanksgiving night, on the HD Science channel–wow!  

You all did a great job turning that fun but chaotic event into real narrative, squeezing some of the chaos out but keeping the fun — and Brad was so funny!  The sky was so blue; the pumpkins so orange, and so many. Frank kept saying, they made it all look so good! And I totally agreed. Animations showing the science were a nice extra touch I hadn’t expected. 

Watching the show entailed a bit more expense than you might realize, since I went out and bought a TV and got our Comcast cable upgraded from internet to include HDTV with HBO. Our new Nintendo Wii, however, I can’t really blame on JonHotchkiss.com. 

All of it, worth every penny.

And getting my first-ever IMDB-able film credit? With the job title “Prop Ninja”?

Priceless.

Thanks and hugs to you all,
Betsy

Punkin chunkin: Old Glory air cannon

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Whew, we just got home from scary Halloween fun, with huge noisy machines that hurl or blast ginormous pumpkins across farmers’ fields!

Jon Hotchkiss is creating a show for Discovery Science Channel about Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin festival. It will air for an hour on Thanksgiving Day, hosted by improv comedian Brad Sherwood (of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he’s really funny!) with the physics explained (of course) by a Nobel laureate–who is Frank Wilczek.

And Betsy Devine is getting a credit too, I am told, as “Prop Ninja” for supplying marshmallows, rubber bands, and lots of other useful items you’ll see onscreen.

My Flickr photoset documents just a small chunk of the massive punkinology that I recommend you sit down to on Thanksgiving Day

Frank talking at Reiter’s Scientific Books

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here you see Frank Wilczek talking at Reiter’s Scientific Books. Aka “Reiter’s Scientific, Professional Technical Books”. What a great bookstore! It was a real bookstore like this that helped Frank (and many young people) get started in science.

Amazon recommends books on the basis that others who bought book X also liked book Y. In a bookstore, you also look into your own future, because shelves include books that people might read after finishing books X and Y.

Such help and encouragement are especially useful to young people or to those who are trying to study something by themselves.

If you go to Washington, don’t miss Reiter’s Book Store. They will ship your purchases to you by UPS, and said purchases can include not just books and magazines but anatomical models of brains or a lifesize skeleton.

Before the Sci Foo deluge

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The Wild Palms Hotel will be wilder in just a few hours, as scientists, webfolk, and other high-tech high IQs arrive for Science Foo 2008.

Frank and I are not the only people here so early. I am pretty sure I saw Neal Gershenfeld across the patio. In the Sci Foo wiki, he has offered to demo some amazingly techno inventions. If he brought a fabricator, his luggage was hugely heavy!

Astrophysicists Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Max Tegmark get here later this morning. Fortunately, even astro-visionaries like Max don’t need to pack any universe inside their suitcases to lead a session. The universe just plain follows them around.

Chris Anderson (long tail) and Chris Anderson (TED) will both be here. I remember once sharing a dorm-room with another Betsy and a third girl named Kedzie. Getting phone messages straight was a nightmare that year, and my sympathies go out to those two Chris Andersons.

Looking forward to meeting a lot of great people and hearing a lot of incredible ideas. I see myself here as a technical “enabler”, doing some scientist-to-webpeople match-making. But this Sci Foo (SciFoo?) blogpost is already long enough.

"Beach book" says USA Today

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I guess Dan Vergano at USA Today really likes Frank’s new book (yay!) — he wrote it up in a review of science “beach books” yesterday and urged his readers to “curl up with Lightness of Being.”

This inspired me to repurpose our teddy bears onto my old beach dune photo. They look happy, don’t they?

Baby delivered this morning by UPS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

On our doorstep before 8 a.m. this morning — Frank’s brand new book, The Lightness of Being!

I decided that our family cradle, now repurposed to stuffed toy storage, would be an excellent place to take this newborn’s photo.

A thoroughly modern baby, this book even has its own website, “LightnessOfBeingBook.com, and its own Flash animation there. Some early reviewers call it lively and cheeky — others describe it as masterful and deep. Eh — it’s a particle, it’s a wave — it’s quite a book.

And what a great way for new babies to get delivered!

Green on green

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Even a skilled translation is like the reflection in water of what the original thinker was trying to say. But such reflections may also have charms of their own.

With this excuse, and with thanks to a friend in Babice for sending me a charmingly machine-translated from the Polish interview with Frank, here’s Frank Wilczek trying to explain the quantum mechanical problem of science and faith:

God this wide notion very different things under which understand nation. Physical theories meanwhile this sure abstract mathematical conceptions there in which is no place for free choice. Some are careful anyway, that science is uncovering this, what it is just God, or how oneself he manifests in physical reality.

I from second side like the conception of complementariness the advanced by Danish phisicist Nielsa the Bohra very. Then the philosophical conception which comes from with phisics. If you try to understand some arrangement, you can this do with different points of sight. Every of them describes one of aspects of studied arrangement.

But when you try to apply it simultaneously, then you fall in contradiction. They in phisics are on this very concrete examples. It in kwantowej mechanics was can qualify the position of particle or her speed, but it will not give to pit both these features simultaneously. They do not exist simultaneously we – can get to know or one, or second.

Bohr – and I for him he – was careful, that this principle is a lot of more general. That the different ways of understanding of world, different points of sight are. Every of them has something to offering. But if you try to apply it simultaneously, then you can fall in conflict. It can so just be with science and belief.

I like the modesty and good sense of Frank’s statement. It makes much more sense than the loud crowings of some who climb to the top of the tower of one single viewpoint (science or faith) to proclaim that the rival viewpoint must be purely nonsense.