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!
July 12th, 2008 · Comments Off on Subwoofer physics, gross and/or angelic shapes
Our kitchen has been the scene of many a vinegar-powered volcano, but here via Boing Boing is something even more wet, wild, and bewildering.
Cornstarch mixed with water has very spooky properties. It is a suspension that seems to transition back and forth between liquid and solid, depending on kinds of forces applied to it. If you try this at home, do not, do not, do NOT pour the mess down a sink or toilet once you have finished playing. The cornstarch will in time settle out of the liquid water, becoming a solid and very expensive mass in the pipes for your plumber to deal with.
I never found my stress reduced by a Rubik’s cube, but then again I am no octopus. Octopi are Einsteins and Houdinis of Invertebrata. But the goal here is not to keep their giant nerve fibers tuned up — it is to find out if they are “octidextrous” or tend to favor one tentacle over the others. This research is crowdsourced, with aquarium visitors keeping track of which (labeled) tentacle gets used for which objects.
So how does this relate to octopus stress? The plan is to serve them octopus food to the favored side, assuming they have one. Interesting and maybe related fact: although most of us are right-handed, formal dinners feature food served to us from the left. Maybe that’s one reason those can be so darn stressful?
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.
Cherished friend, colleague, and collaborator Sidney Richard Coleman, Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University, died on 18 November 2007 after a long struggle with Lewy body disease.
It’s illustrated by a snip from the photo above, a candid shot taken by Lubos Motl and donated by him to the Wikimedia Commons.
Shelley no doubt has more and funnier memories of Sidney than anyone else. Restraining myself from cherry-picking his essay, which I hope you’ll read, he quotes the tagline of Sidney’s 1962 thesis:
“What we do here is nothing to what we dream of doing.”
Sidney lifted that quote from Justine, by the Marquis de Sade.
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine,
photo by Amity Wilczek.
That was the daily diet of the wasp colony that built this huge paper nest in 1857.
Before you envy this self-indulgent diet, bear in mind that the wasps got their sugar dissolved in their beer.
This magnificently well-fed colony soon drew the attention of nearby wasps, who abandoned their own nests and moved in to help build the ever-growing mansion. They were welcomed “without the least show of opposition,” says the exhibit label.
So if you plan to write up the history of open-source software or BarCamp, please give appropriate credit to these pioneers.
(For more information, see a closeup of the label.) It’s now on display in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.
Galaxy Zoo is the project of some Oxford astrophysicists trying to classify millions of never-before-seen-by-human-eyes stellar objects that big computers have photographed.* It turns out that human beings are much better at doing these classifications than computers are. It also turns out that people all over the world enjoy doing this via the internet. (Insert words like “Web 2.0” and “social networking.”)
Now learned Oxonians are trying to make it official that the name of one recently discovered object (maybe the first-ever echo from a long-dead quasar) should be “Hanny’s Voorwerp.” Why? Because this object was first seen and asked about by a young Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny, one of Galaxy Zoo’s many enthusiastic amateurs. “Voorwerp” means “object” in Dutch. After Hanny flagged this unusual blob, Oxford astrophysicists used their connections to get other astronomers around the world to start taking closer looks at this bit of the sky.
That’s just one of many surprises from the Galaxy Zoo collaboration, including an odd discovery in neurology aptly summed up as “People are screwed up, not the universe.”
Hanny will be visiting Oxford this weekend, and I’m guessing the Oxford guys show her a very good time.
To examine Napoleon’s hair, the team used the technique of neutron activation, which has two important advantages: it does not destroy the sample and it provides extremely precise results, even from samples with a small mass. The researchers placed Napoleon’s hair in the core of the nuclear reactor in Pavia and used neutron activation to establish that all of the hair samples contained traces of arsenic.
So, was he poisoned? No. His hair had (what would be for moderns) high levels of arsenic even when he was a boy.
One surprising result (they tested a lot more hair samples besides just Napoleon’s) was the high level of arsenic found in everybody’s hair in the nineteenth century — 100 times greater than was found in more recent hair.
Future experiments planned by the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (Cuore) group in Pavia include studying the rare double-beta decay and measuring the mass of a neutrino.
We took a long walk with Leonardo da Vinci through France’s springtime, yesterday.
Da Vinci spent his last years as the guest of the French king — his rooms and some inventions are now on display at the Château du Clos Lucé near Amboise.
The kids with us, including Frank, loved pulling the rope, turning the crank, etc. on all the working invention models. A “helicopter” that can be rotated by a even a small visitor was the special favorite.
Now I have to get ready to take yet another train trip.
Tonight, Umberto Eco is giving a talk about “Perverse Uses of Mathematics” — in Italian, which I speak badly but understand well. (This is in contrast to Spanish, where I can easily make myself understood but have to keep asking my children what other people just said. Very mysterious.)
The Duke seems an unlikely name for a hotel in Rome–then again, it seems like an unlikely nickname for a movie star born in Winterset, Iowa. But The Duke is indeed a very Roman hotel–big beautiful bathtub, bidet, and balcony.
My plan for today is to sit in the Piazza Navona drinking coffee and writing about Sidney Coleman. There’s a whole chapter in the book I’m writing that swirls around Sidney and the Erice physics summer schools. Black Italian espresso is the perfect inspiration!
