Category: Science

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Popular Science Hits the Spot

Friday I picked up How the Universe Got Its Spots : Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by the astrophysicist Janna Levin. I met Janna once. Fresh off the factory floor at Caltech, I arrived at Berkeley having convinced the graduate school admissions people there that I was going to do particle physics. I really had no such intentions. I had decided I wanted to do astrophysics. Luckily I didn’t have to take the first year grad courses (so I’ve only been through Jackson, once, thank you very much!) so I was able to immediately start taking astrophysics classes. Having taken only one astro course at Caltech, I really had a lot of learning to do! But already in my first year I was trying to find some research to do: research was the reason I went to grad school, not to take classes. One of the people I visited was Janna Levin, who at the time was a postdoc. She gave me these really cool papers on chaos in black hole solutions as well as on the main subject of this popular book, what if the large scale topology of the universe is nontrivial. So I’m sure she doesn’t remember me, but I remember those papers on topology and also a paper she wrote with J.D. Barrow on the twin paradox in compact universes. I would be neglegent if I didn’t quote the Simpsons episode where Stephen Hawking makes an appearance:

Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can’t believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me.
Moe: All right, it’s closing time. Who’s paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking’s voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn’t say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did.
[a glove comes out of Hawking’s wheelechair, bopping Homer in the face]
Homer: [still imitating] D’oh.

Shortly after talking to Dr. Levin about her work, I met with Dr. Daniel Lidar in the Chemistry department who was working on quantum computing. I had done some “research” as an undergrad on quantum computing, and the newness of quantum theory really appealed to me. Astrophysics is grand and beautiful and there was so much new data coming in, but many of the great theory problems seemed so large and so well gone over that I was sucked away from astrophysics. I am still jealous of the astrophysicist when they get to contemplate the entire frickin universe. Whereas I get to contemplate things I shall never really see. Well both are pretty cool.
“How the Universe Got It’s Spots” is an interesting little book. It is written as a series of letters to the author’s mother and explains all sorts of science, from topology, to black holes, to quantum theory. I’ve become, over the years, a hell of picky person when it comes to popular science books. I will admit that there were a few times when I had to close my brain during “Spots”, but most of these have to do with describing quantum theory, and happily it wasn’t the uncertainty principle which got mangled. And I’m just too stubborn to listen to what anyone else has to say about quantum theory. So me saying there were only a few rough spots in “Spots” is like saying that it’s really really well done.
Interestingly, the book takes a very personal view of the science discussed in the book. Not personal like most popular science articles where the author descripes his or her story and relationship to all these bigwigs in the grand quest we call science, but personal instead in detailing the authors emotional relationship to her work (and in some broader context, her relationship to the world around her as well.) In this way it reminds me a bit of Good Benito by Alan Lightman. Those astrophysicists really how to hit a guys emotion nerves. Here is a nice passage from “Spots” describing mathematicians and their penchant for being insane:

When I tell the stories of their suicide and mental illness, people always wonder if their fragility came from the nature of the knowledge-the knowledge of nature. I think rather that they went mad from rejection. Their mathematical obsessions were all-encompassing and yet ethereal. They needed their colleagues beyond needing their approval. To be spurned by their peers meant death of their ideas. They needed to encrypt the meaning in others’ thoughts and be assured their ideas would be perpetuated.

Another reason that I’m hard on popular science books has to do with the amount of learned. Growing up, the best popular science books all had one common trait. You would be reading the book and thinking about the topic and you would think, “well, it seems to me that what they’ve talked about here implies X.” And then a few pages latter you would read that indeed scientists discovered that such and such does imply X! Great popular science to me has a lot to do with great foreshadowing. The problem I have now is that I know most of the story. I’ve caught up to modern times. So the foreshadowing doesn’t work for me.
On the other hand, popular science articles do have a very interesting effect when I read them today. They remind me of the big picture, and often they let my mind wander. While I was reading “Spots,” for instance, the following occurred to me. One of the reasons we love relativity, both special and general is that it arises from such simple postulates into a beautiful and complex theory. One sometimes hears that this is missing in quantum theory: where do all these postulates about Hilbert space and Born’s rule and such come from? Are there some nice basic posulates from which we can reason, much like Einstein did for special relativity, as to why quantum theory should be the way it is? But while I was reading “Spots” it occurred to me that may this was an illusion. Suppose that instead of discovering special and general relativity before quantum theory (O.K. there is some overlap, but the truely disturbing parts of quantum theory emerged after both relativity theories.) If you are a quantum person living in a quantum world, does all this talk about mirrors and clocks seems rather troubling. Mirrors are big classical thingees. What do quantum mirrors look like, and is it natural to talk the thought experiments that Einstein used? But in a larger sense, I also began to wonder if the principles of relativity are really so natural. Are they natural to someone who experiences the amplitudes of quantum theory in their everyday experience? Why is it that we spend time trying to think about how quantum theory might emerge (this is, after all, what interpretations are really after, isn’t it?), but don’t spend time thinking about a deeper theory from which, say, special relativity might emerge. This, I guess is one reason I’m interested in loop quantum gravity: there, one of the challenges is to really see how our four dimensional world emerges from the, for a better word for it, quantum foam. So why does special relativity look the way it does, quantum boy? And it’s silly questions like these which keep me reading popular science, and will continue to keep me reading popular science, long after I’ve grown accustomed to the history.

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Death, Taxes, and the 2nd Law

Seth Lloyd, in Nature 430, 971 (2004):

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

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Journal of Well Written Scientific Papers

Via Michael Nielsen I’ve found that Ben Schumacher, inventor of the word “qubit” and quantum information theorist extraordinaire, has a blog. Michael points to the following from quote from Ben:

But you know, so much of academic writing is bad. It is banal, orotund, unmusical, and stuffed with wads of unnecessary jargon. It is the sort of writing that does more to obscure meaning than to convey it. I see this stuff almost every day. I swim in it. OK, maybe I do exaggerate, a little. After all, I teach at a liberal arts college that is moderately well-known for teaching people how to write. Our faculty is full of novelists and poets and whatnot. But let me tell you, it’s here, too. It’s everywhere. It is like a fungus growing over all things, blurring their shapes — the verbal equivalent, maybe, of the ivy on academic buildings. And like the ivy, I guess, its main purpose is to conceal the shabby edifices beneath

Which made me think that it would be fun to create a scientific journal in which good writing was a requirment. No silly page limits either. You either write a killer article, which is comprehensible and well written, or your articled doesn’t get accepted. Even if you result is correct and even if your result is groundbreaking. Sure, not all journals could be this way, but it would if such a journal existed, I would certainly be a regular reader. I certainly know that there are people who are up to the task: every once in a while you stumble upon a piece of scientific writing which is so well written it just makes you cry the next time you look through Physical Review Letters.

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NYTimes Flubs it Up

From the New York Times this Sunday:

Hearings on how Kansas schoolchildren should be taught about the origins of life – the fourth and final session concluded on Thursday in Topeka – quickly morphed from science lesson to vocabulary quiz.

Repeat after me: the theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. The theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. Bleh. Shame on you New York Times.

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Snarky Mode On

Robert Laughlin, Nobel prize winner for the theory behind the fractional quantum Hall effect, has a new book out, “A Different Universe.” The book is interesting, but it also has its problems. As you might guess from previous posts I’ve made, Professor Laughlin has a amazing view of quantum computers:

There is a great deal of interest lately in the quantum computer, a fundamentally new kind of computational hardware that would exploit the entanglement of the quantum wave function to perform calculations presently impossible with conventional computers. The most important of these is the generation of enormous primes numbers and the quick factorization of other enormous numbers. The impossibility of factoring a number that is the product of two large primes in reasonable time with conventional computers is the basis of modern cryptography. However, quantum computation has a terrible Achilles heel that becomes clear when one confronts the problem of reading out the answer: the effects that distinguish quantum computers from conventional ones also cause quantum indeterminism. Quantum-mechanical wave functions do indeed evolve deterministically, but the process of turning them into signals people can read generates errors. Computers that make mistakes are not very useful, so the design issue in quantum computation that counts is overcoming mistakes by measurement. A textbook method for doing this is to place a million copies of the same experiment in a small box and measure something they do collectively-generating oscillating magnetic fields, for example, as occurs in a quantum computer built with electron spins. The damage inflicted by the measurement process then affects only a few copies, leaving the rest intact. This trick is so powerful that variations of it enable you to read out the entire wave function of any quantum computer, at least in principle. However a logical implication is that you have created not a fabulous new kind of digital computer but a conventional analogue computer-a type of machine we do not use in the modern era because it is so easily disrupted by noise. Thus the frenzy over quantum computing misses the key point that the physical basis of computational reliability is emergent Newtonianness. One can imagine doing a computation without exploiting these principles, just as one can imagine proving by brute force that broken symmetry occurs, but a much more likely outcome is that eliminating computational mistakes will prove to be fundamentally impossible because its physical basis is absent. The view that this problem is trivial is a fantasy spun out of reductionist beliefs. Naturally, I hope I am wrong, and I wish those who invest in quantum computing the best of luck. I also ask that anyone anxious to invest in a bridge in lower Manhattan contact me right away, for there will be discounts for a limited time only.

Wow. Can I really read this and not respond? I just can’t resist. And especially I just can’t resist snarking. I should apologize for what I’m about to write, but my feeble mind just can’t take it. I just can’t take it anymore! So here are my suggestions for Laureate Laughlin:

1. Please read J. von Neumann’s, “Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organism from Unreliable Components.” (1956) The basis of computer reliability has absolutely nothing to do with “Newtonianness”. The basis of conventional computer reliability has to do with redudancy, and more physically with the thermodynamics of many condensed matter systems.
2. After you’ve mastered the most fundamental ideas of fault tolerance, it might be useful to understand the ideas behind error correction. Please read C. Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948). Sure we are going backwards in time, but I think it’s important for you to realize that redundancy (“place a million copies”) is not the only way to encode information. Indeed this fact will become very important as we move on to step 3.
3. Now you’re ready for the big stuff. I know you know quantum theory like the back of your hand, so this step will be easier for you than for many others. Please read John Preskill’s “Fault-tolerant Quantum Computation.” See how the previous two ideas, when slightly modified for the quantum world, lead to a theory of fault-tolerant quantum computers. Isn’t that amazing? I consider it to be one of the most important results in physics in the last thirty years, but you’re older and wiser, so you may feel free to downgrade it. But please don’t desecrate what you haven’t had the time to understand. Quantum error correcting degrees of freedom are most distinctively not the simplistic collective degrees of freedom which you insinuate (“oscillating magnetic fields.”) The idea is more subtle, and thus, I believe more beautiful. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you must surely admit that your solution to the fractional quantum Hall effect is only beautiful when you have the background to understand the theory, and so too, quantum fault-tolerance is beautiful, but only once you’ve sat down and understood the theory.
Oh, and by the way, the generation of large prime numbers is easy, not hard, for conventional computers (but you did better than the string theorist Michio Kaku, who I once saw on T.V. claim that quantum computers were amazing because they could efficiently multiply large numbers.)

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The Physics of the 21st Century

One often hears biologists say that biology is the “physics of the 21st century.” When they say this, I think the main motive is to indicate that great scientific advances will be coming out of biology in the next century. Certainly I agree wholeheartedly with this. But I also wonder whether the following ever crosses the mind of someone who claims that biology is the physics of the 21st century. Physics in the 20th century, and in particular particle physics, was supported by governments in large part because of the fear of the nuclear bomb. If biology is going to be the physics of the 21st century, does this mean that as physics had the nuclear bomb, biology will have biological warfare? Sure it’s a silly thought, but still it’s a bit sobering too.
Another way in which biology is becoming more like physics is the birth of “big biology.” Take for example, the list of authors on a recent Nature article about sequencing the X chromosome (The DNA Sequence of the Human X Chromosome. Nature 434:325 (2005)):

Ross MT, Grafham DV, Coffey AJ, Scherer S, McLay K, Muzny D, Platzer M, Howell GR, Burrows C, Bird CP, Frankish A, Lovell FL, Howe KL, Ashurst JL, Fulton RS, Sudbrak R, Wen G, Jones MC, Hurles ME, Andrews TD, Scott CE, Searle S, Ramser J, Whittaker A, Deadman R, Carter NP, Hunt SE, Chen R, Cree A, Gunaratne P, Havlak P, Hodgson A, Metzker ML, Richards S, Scott G, Steffen D, Sodergren E, Wheeler DA, Worley KC, Ainscough R, Ambrose KD, Ansari-Lari MA, Aradhya S, Ashwell RI, Babbage AK, Bagguley CL, Ballabio A, Banerjee R, Barker GE, Barlow KF, Barrett IP, Bates KN, Beare DM, Beasley H, Beasley O, Beck A, Bethel G, Blechschmidt K, Brady N, Bray-Allen S, Bridgeman AM, Brown AJ, Brown MJ, Bonnin D, Bruford EA, Buhay C, Burch P, Burford D, Burgess J, Burrill W, Burton J, Bye JM, Carder C, Carrel L, Chako J, Chapman JC, Chavez D, Chen E, Chen G, Chen Y, Chen Z, Chinault C, Ciccodicola A, Clark SY, Clarke G, Clee CM, Clegg S, Clerc-Blankenburg K, Clifford K, Cobley V, Cole CG, Conquer JS, Corby N, Connor RE, David R, Davies J, Davis C, Davis J, Delgado O, Deshazo D, Dhami P, Ding Y, Dinh H, Dodsworth S, Draper H, Dugan-Rocha S, Dunham A, Dunn M, Durbin KJ, Dutta I, Eades T, Ellwood M, Emery-Cohen A, Errington H, Evans KL, Faulkner L, Francis F, Frankland J, Fraser AE, Galgoczy P, Gilbert J, Gill R, Glockner G, Gregory SG, Gribble S, Griffiths C, Grocock R, Gu Y, Gwilliam R, Hamilton C, Hart EA, Hawes A, Heath PD, Heitmann K, Hennig S, Hernandez J, Hinzmann B, Ho S, Hoffs M, Howden PJ, Huckle EJ, Hume J, Hunt PJ, Hunt AR, Isherwood J, Jacob L, Johnson D, Jones S, de Jong PJ, Joseph SS, Keenan S, Kelly S, Kershaw JK, Khan Z, Kioschis P, Klages S, Knights AJ, Kosiura A, Kovar-Smith C, Laird GK, Langford C, Lawlor S, Leversha M, Lewis L, Liu W, Lloyd C, Lloyd DM, Loulseged H, Loveland JE, Lovell JD, Lozado R, Lu J, Lyne R, Ma J, Maheshwari M, Matthews LH, McDowall J, McLaren S, McMurray A, Meidl P, Meitinger T, Milne S, Miner G, Mistry SL, Morgan M, Morris S, Muller I, Mullikin JC, Nguyen N, Nordsiek G, Nyakatura G, O’dell CN, Okwuonu G, Palmer S, Pandian R, Parker D, Parrish J, Pasternak S, Patel D, Pearce AV, Pearson DM, Pelan SE, Perez L, Porter KM, Ramsey Y, Reichwald K, Rhodes S, Ridler KA, Schlessinger D, Schueler MG, Sehra HK, Shaw-Smith C, Shen H, Sheridan EM, Shownkeen R, Skuce CD, Smith ML, Sotheran EC, Steingruber HE, Steward CA, Storey R, Swann RM, Swarbreck D, Tabor PE, Taudien S, Taylor T, Teague B, Thomas K, Thorpe A, Timms K, Tracey A, Trevanion S, Tromans AC, d’Urso M, Verduzco D, Villasana D, Waldron L, Wall M, Wang Q, Warren J, Warry GL, Wei X, West A, Whitehead SL, Whiteley MN, Wilkinson JE, Willey DL, Williams G, Williams L, Williamson A, Williamson H, Wilming L, Woodmansey RL, Wray PW, Yen J, Zhang J, Zhou J, Zoghbi H, Zorilla S, Buck D, Reinhardt R, Poustka A, Rosenthal A, Lehrach H, Meindl A, Minx PJ, Hillier LW, Willard HF, Wilson RK, Waterston RH, Rice CM, Vaudin M, Coulson A, Nelson DL, Weinstock G, Sulston JE, Durbin R, Hubbard T, Gibbs RA, Beck S, Rogers J, Bentley DR.

Now if this author list doesn’t look like it could come from CERN or Fermilab or SLAC, I don’t know what does!

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Breeding Books

In today’s age of online scientific publishing, it’s hard to remember the days when one would have to trudge to the library to do significant research. Even harder to think about are the days before the printing press, when books were translated by hand. In those old days, knowledge moved slowly and truly such work must have been a labor of love (two good words, scrivener: “a professional or public copyist or writer” and scriptorium: “a copying room for the scribes in a medieval monastery.” Scrivener, of course, is probably most famously known from the short story Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.) And when we think about it a bit, we realize that the resemblence between copying books and the other labor of love, having children, is more than just superficial. Indeed, in order for a book to be born, a previous copy must exist. Similarly books are destroyed over a given of years. A little more sophisticated model suggests that the birth rate for books will not be constant but will decrease as the number of books saturates “the market.” Thus we can map the growth and survival rates of books as a function of time.
In this months Science (307, p. 1305-1307 , 2005) John Cisne proposes just such a model for the survival of books during the Middle Ages. What Cisne finds is that indeed the age distributions of books surviving today predicted by a simple population dynamic model indeed appear to be correct. So here are some cool numbers:

…manuscripts were about 15 to 30 times more likely to be copied as to be destroyed and had a half-life of four to nine centuries, and that population’s doubling time was on the order of two to three decades.

I wonder if one of the reasons why science didn’t advance as much during the Middle Ages was that this long doubling time (two to three decades) ment that it was very unlikely that the fruits of your hard work producing a book would not be disseminated during your lifetime. Think if you could work on science but that the implications of your work wouldn’t ever be reveal until long after your death. The invention of the printing press sure was a marvelous event, wasn’t it?

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Best Abstract Ever

Ken Brown sends me a nomination for the “best abstract ever”:

Malberg and O’Neil, PRL 39,1333 (1977), “Pure Electron Plasma, Liquid, and Crystal”
Abstract: We speculate on the possibility of liquefying and crystallizing a magnetically confined pure electron plasma.

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Word of the Day

Economists are the source of many of my favorite words. Here is another neat one:

Leptokurtic: pertaining to a probability distribution more heavily concentrated around the mean, i.e., having a sharper, narrower peak, than the normal distribution with the same variance.

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Under the Milky Way Tonight

In astro-ph/0501177, Warren Brown, Margaret Geller, Scott Kenyon, and Michael Kurtz announce the discovery of a star which is traveling out of the Milky Way galactic halo at a speed of at least around 700 kilometers per second (.2% of the speed of light.) That’s the fastest ever observed, and the authors speculate that this may be an example of a star which interacted with the black hole at the center of our galaxy. For comparrison, the escape velocity for a star located at its current distance from the galactic center (50 kiloparsecs) is 300 kilometers per second.
So I guess we should all say good bye to SDSS J090745.0+024507. Say “hi” to the intergalactic medium for us, won’t you?