Thirty Stories Up

Golf!

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Split Rock Resort Hole Four.

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My previous set of posts about a couple of lectures I went to sparked some interesting discussion on why it is that I go to every lecture I get the chance to, even on subjects that don’t especially interest me. Certainly, it seems like they provide no actual utility, and between having pressing schoolwork to attend to and being in no way compelled to actually go to said lectures, it would be a clear choice to let most of them slide right by instead of making an effort to get to them. One could argue that it’s out of some misguided sense of academic responsibility, but I think there can be a more clear-cut, compelling argument that going to every lecture possible is useful, educational, and personally rewarding, regardless of the subject matter or lecturer.

First, let’s examine the utilitarian end of attending lectures. At first glance, lectures seem fairly useless as a tool for learning; they generally cover esoteric subjects, gloss over details, and unless they’re required by a professor, don’t actually contribute to the bottom line in the form of the all-important GPA. However, one has to look past the grade-by-grade mentality that so many students have, and instead to the big picture. Most college classes are either skin-deep examinations of a huge subject (most 1000-level courses), or in-depth examinations of one topic (2000 and 3000-level courses). While this should theoretically be good at giving students both a broad base of knowledge to work from and intimate familiarity with certain topics, the end result is all too often that the broad base of knowledge is so shallow and inconsequential as to be useless, and the intimate familiarity with certain subjects, while useful in its own right, is generally isolated and doesn’t ever expand as a base of knowledge for the student. The general knowledge, like a wide expanse of sand, looks impressive but washes away quickly except where there’s a structure built up through deep learning of one subject. Of course, with no beach, that isolated structure soon begins to wash away, becoming irrelevant as the student’s knowledge fades through time and disuse. Lectures provide an intermediary to this scene, a type of sea grass dotting the landscape, providing lots of small anchor points that don’t individually amount to anything, but together keep the integrity of both the beach and the structure intact. Getting these capsules of isolated learning through lectures, as ancillary as they may seem to anything directly useful, serve to ground one’s knowledge using lots of reference points, to give lots of small ideas in which to ground that broad base of learning.

Of course, college isn’t just supposed to be about doing what’s most useful. There’s also the small matter of becoming a well-rounded person through a strong liberal arts education, or so the contemporary theories would have us believe. Well, lectures are just about the ideal training for that, as well. The ideal educational goal of college, as it’s expressed so often, is “to learn how to learn”; ideally, by the time you graduate, you should be proficient enough with both your intellectual tools and your research resources to be able to figure out just about anything on your own, given enough time. While colleges often do a great job at making the physical tools of research available (giant libraries, vast archives of journals, subscriptions to electronic resources), they often seem to neglect the fundamental points of actually teaching the learning process. If the only way to learn how to learn is through repitition, then everyone graduating with the same number of credits should have had about the same number of chances, plus or minus a few. But if you consider each lecture to be a running start at a new topic, starting with exposition from an expert and ending with the time-honored Socratic tradition of Q&A, each lecture is like its own self-contained lesson in how to learn a new subject. Enough of these stacking up, especially in the first two years as an undergrad, and a student can get a real competitive advantage over everyone else when it comes to picking up new classes in the next couple of years. Making it easy to pick up new subjects is arguably even more of an advantage than having put in the time to pick up a lot of subjects.

Finally, although I hate to sound like a starry-eyed poet, frequently going to lectures helps students to find themselves. Most people enter college with about the same experiences; there’s only so many variants of the high school experience out there, and 99 percent of them have been discovered and done to death by now. A normal student is only going to have so many things that they can intelligently discuss before either beginning to sound like an MP3 player with a bad codec (take that, archaic technological idioms!) or shutting up entirely. Lectures give the student a wider base of things to draw from in conversation or thought, with a few of those hopefully leading to some sort of epiphany, or at least synthesis of ideas; perhaps one of the most important things a degree indicates about a person is that they’ve been through the process of differentiating themselves and forming their own original thoughts. It’s hard to be anything but a follower until you start to grow on your own and form new ideas.

With so much self-improvement, education, and usefulness at stake, it should be clear why I go to these lectures, even on subjects I’m not necessarily thrilled about or for lecturers that I’m not particularly enthusiastic about. So how do you view lectures in terms of your college experience?

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Although yesterday’s Michio Kaku lecture was generally well-received, even if people had issues with some of the talking points, the evening lecture on ethics in stem cell research was, at least in terms of those I talked to afterwards, a fiasco. I won’t call anybody out here, since I’m going to be fairly critical; I’m just going to give a few points of my own on things not to do when you have to put on a lecture.

I could go on, but I won’t. Let’s just leave it at this: when you lecture, treat it as making a point to a skeptical audience, not preaching your entire moral viewpoint to the choir, with a thin veneer of fact to justify naming it a lecture.

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Today, I attended a lecture performed by Dr. Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at CUNY and the author of such books as Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimens ion and Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, having a weekly national radio show, and making frequent appearances on NOVA and the BBC, and voted by a New York Magazine poll as one of the 100 smartest people in New York.

Spoiler warning: I am a computer science major with an interest in the hard sciences. I am not, myself, a hard science major. There may be many glaring errors in my examples, as I was typing notes from the lecture in a hurry, and I encourage you to bring up anything you find in the comments. Please try not to jump up and down and throw things at the screen when you see a major physics error below. None of the theories and examples below are my own; they were all part of the presentation in one way or another.

He begun with a vignette about getting to retrace Einstein’s early steps as part of a TV program he was filming. The main popular question about Einstein, he posits, is “What has he done for me lately?” Without relativity, he argues, everything collapses, from TV and radio to our beloved blogosphere, and even our popular culture would be radically different (Star Trek being an example of something based upon Einstein’s theories). He also told an amusing anecdote about a theologan, a lawyer, and a theoretical physicist, which I’ll relate to anyone who asks in person but which probably loses a lot of its appeal in text.

The next step, he argues, is to take Einstein a step farther, to go past retracing his steps and move forward to how his theories will fertilize the fields of science for the next hundred years. Could his theories be applied to time travel, multidimensional space, or other such fantastic ideas? Can Einstein’s fateful question of whether one can outrace a light beam lead to developments in science that we can’t yet begin to imagine?

Judging from the talk, there is no shortage of fantastic ideas being seriously explored in physics today. Chiefly, he stated the physicists now believe that not only do physicists now believe that there are multiple universes, which are being constantly created, but that this theory is testable, and moreover, is testable by human experimentation and not just with impossibly theoretical equipment, merely by equipment we don’t yet have.

The crux of the developments in this field is the relative nature of time. Time is, effectively, a relative concept; imagine a police officer chasing a speeder. When the cop pulls alongside the speeder, the speeder and the cop are still relative to each other. However, with light, this is not the same; no matter how fast one is traveling, light moves away from you at the speed of light. If you have a still vantage point and a pursuer catching up with a light beam, both the observer at the vantage point and the pursuer of the light beam see the light moving at the same speed, despite the fact that they themselves have different speeds relative to each other.

Of course, this wasn’t accepted immediately by the scientific community; how does one explain it? The answer is that time itself is relative; the pursuer himself exists in time that is slower. His body processes, thought processes, his chemical processes are all slower. This is tested and proven by experimentation.

This leads to all sorts of apperent paradoxes, the most famous of which is the twins paradox. If you put one identical twin on Earth, and another on a rocket ship leaving on Earth at 99% of the speed of light, then turned around the twin on the rocket and brought him back to Earth, he would be much younger than the twin who stayed on Earth the entire time. Though the same amount of time seemingly elapsed, it was moving slower for the twin in the rocket ship; time was slower, and therefore his trip took less time. The tricky bit is that, while they’re traveling away from each other, if they take the time to look at each other through a telescope, they each see the other twin as younger. But how can this be? It’s explained, again, through relativity; it can’t be a fair comparison until you bring them back together, in which case, the one who traveled is relatively younger as the deceleration of bringing himself back involves him moving relative to the other sibling.

Complicating things in the Einsteinian view is that gravity is not a ‘pulling’ force as it is conventionally thought in the Newtonian view. Instead, the geometry of space around an object is curved; gravity in this worldview becomes a pushing force, rather than a pushing force. This is testably true as well, no doubt causing much consternation among high school science teachers that just want to teach the concept simply and forget about it.

In addition, the Doppler effect when applied to light, radiation, and other forces allows us to measure the expansion of our universe, and allows us to come up with a picture of what our universe is and where it comes from. Current WMAP satellite observation shows that our universe is 73% dark energy, 23% dark matter, 4% hydrogen and helium, and .03% “other”; that is, all the other elements that make up planets, asteroids, people, cars, and record players. It also allows us to come up with a microwave-derived ‘baby picture’ of what the universe used to look like.

The current verifiable theory that best fits all the data available, is inflationary theory, which says this: The universe underwent a huge, fast expansion at the beginning of time, with everything else just being an aftereffect; more controversial is this theory’s assertion that there’s nothing in the data that insists that this process is unique. It could happen again, giving rise to the theory of ‘eternal inflation’, that of this process occurring all the time, universes sprouting from each other, linking and breaking away from each other.

But, as Einstein once said to Charlie Chaplin, “What does it all mean?” Our universe has four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces), but it wasn’t always this way. At the beginning of the universe, there was one force; an imperceptible instant of a second later, gravity split away, and then the remaining forces split away. We can overcome these forces, smash the smallest particles into even smaller particles. But the best we can come up with is the Standard Model, the model that most closely approximates the world. It is accurate to one part in a billion, 18 free parameters, 3 redundant particles, and no mention of gravity. What does this all mean, for the non-science majors among us? Essentially, this model is a complete, almost unworkable mess.

So what eluded Einstein? Why are we working a messy theory that almost works, but never quite clicks into place? The answer, says Kaku, is string theory. String theory posits that elementary particles are actually tiny, tiny vibrating ’strings’, and different vibrating frequencies are different particles. God and the universe are just, as Kaku says, “a symphony, music resonating through 11 dimensions of hyperspace.”

So if our universe is a bubble of sorts, made up of vibrating string, what happens if another bubble comes in contact? What happens if the strings begin to interact? Can we test for the presence of other universes, for deviations in what we percieve as law?

Physics is trying. Scientists are hard at work on a triple-satellite system called LISA, which will attempt to create a picture of the instant of the creation of the universe.

Running short on time, Kaku went quickly through several topics, including black holes, wormholes, the death of the universe, travel between universes, and even more exciting, travel through time, and paradox, and what the future will bring.

What does Kaku see for the future? He sees us moving towards a society powerful enough to harness the power of entire planets, of being able to do just about whatever we want with that portion of a percent of the universe that is heavy matter. The Internet? The communication system for the entire civilization. The EU and NAFTA? The emerging economy of this civilization. Then we’ll move on to harnessing stars, colonizing the galaxy with power from that 4% of the universe that is hydrogen and helium. And then what? When there’s no more space, and the time for all the stars in the universe runs out, what kind of civilization will we create? He suggests a civilization trying to harness the power of black holes and wormholes to escape this universe, to bridge ourselves to a universe that isn’t dying.

The final consensus among the attending undergrads that I talked to is that, while it was a good talk, it was heavier on popular science than necessary, with lots of gloss but less substance than they would have liked. Two philosophy professors separately took issue with the portrayal of string theory as a verifiable science as well, and mentioned fields such as quantum computing that also explain the relevant data in an equally valid and equally testable way. Feel free to discuss your take on it if you attended, or your views on the relevant topics or questions on the lecture if you didn’t, in the comments.

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So, I’m sure all of you faithful readers who haven’t turned to a life of brigandry and highway robbery have noticed my absence, flying in the face of my claim a few weeks ago to setting a schedule and sticking to it.

The problem, of course, is college. And I don’t mean in a typical ‘I have no time’ way; in fact, I have it fairly easy as far as time demands from class go; a few hours for case studies here, and a few hours of programming there, and I’m in the clear, in sharp contrast to my double-major friends with several hours of quantum mechanics homework a day. It’s just that my particular scheduled time (9 to 10 in the morning, for anyone interested) happens to fall in a window that, over the last two weeks, has been occupied with sleep that I haven’t been getting at night.

One of the joys of being a resident student in college, for anyone that’s not there yet or is too long gone to remember, is living in a room and a suite with other students who are, in theory, there to learn just as much as you are. This is supposed to lead to a strong social environment, and all things considered, it generally succeeds at that. However, it also means that the dorm room becomes a social area in addition to a sanctuary or lair (depending on how aligned you are to good or evil, respectively). In the presence of a number of excellent suitemates, one often forgets to check the clock often enough, and soon enough one 11 PM card game turns into several nights of staying up until 2 or 3, often just talking.

This, in itself, doesn’t present a problem. There are still plenty of hours in the day, and sleep merely shifts around a few hours, with the inevitable class or two interrupting. The problem comes when one attempts to schedule something requiring self-motivation in the time slot that often is too temptingly open for much-needed sleep; one day of not posting becomes two or three, then a week, then the posting routine becomes an albatross (”I could start again, but then I’d have to deal with a backlog of work”). I’m shifting my resolution from posting at a set time each day to posting when I can again, this time with an eye towards keeping track of when I can post well and post dependably, and hopefully this will yield better results.

This should be my last ‘meta’ blog post for a while; I realize that it may be provable scientifically that nothing on earth is less interesting to most people than a writer complaining that they can’t write. Next time, it’s back to the articles.

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Drink the worm!

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Gummy worms and small batch rum.

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Several threads lead me to step out of the scheduled discussion on Quine and reductionism and instead to a discussion on language and computer programming, two of my favorite subjects. Some of you may wonder what philosophy and computer science have to do with each other. It should become clear to you by the end that a discussion of programming serves as a useful case study for exactly what was discussed in the last two articles.

Quine’s professional focus was on language and logic; his papers clearly show this background, assuming the reader is able to parse all sorts of logical and linguistic constructs in quick succession. In its own way, computer programming is the blending of logic and linguistic structures into one entity with almost unlimited utility. First, a bit of unfortunately lengthy but ultimately necessary background. Computer programming, for those of you with no idea what it entails, is in essence the act of providing instructions to a computer, which will then carry out those instructions. Of course, one can’t simply start typing into the computer as if it were an IM program or (goodness forbid) a blog; computers, for all intents and purposes, natively understand a limited language, called ‘assembly language’, made up of expressions and syntax that no human could parse without at least some limited training. However, these are the only instructions the computer can parse; any instructions not in this language are going to result in errors.

To make the task of programming easier, a large number of programming languages have been created that resemble natural language a little more; these are sets of rules slightly more abstract than assembly, allowing the programmer to concentrate on logic and automating some of the basic tasks that must be completed for a program to work. Programs called ‘compilers’ and ‘linkers’ take code written in these languages and translate it into assembly language; code written in any other programming language is as useless to the computer as this article until it’s compiled into assembly.

These programming languages, as with any language, consist of two major components: syntax and vocabulary. The difference between a natural language, such as English, and a programming language lies within how the syntax and vocabulary differ. English, in the effort to be able to express all ideas that can be conceived, has extended over the generations with a massive ‘global’ vocabulary (that each speaker is expected to know) and a syntax riddled with exceptions, contradictions, and just plain weirdness. This is what I’ll refer to as the maximal approach to language; every new thought requires new global vocabulary or a new grammatical construct. Programming languages, however, take an opposite, or minimal, approach; the syntax is rigidly defined and cannot be deviated from, and the ‘global’ vocabulary consists of a few symbols and words that are of some use in a general sense; new ideas are expressed through combining these and creating ‘local’ vocabulary, or concepts that can be understood merely by knowing the language and studying that program.

The greatest strength of natural language, its very extensibility and flexibility, becomes its greatest weakness as well when logic is concerned. It is difficult, if not impossible, to express an idea with total clarity in English; there is always some ambiguity involved. This is the precise reason that we cannot simply start typing English sentences into the computer; there is simply no easy way to make English precise enough to operate a logical machine and still have it be recognizable as English. This is a stumbling block for all fields involving precision, including math, logic, and programming, as well as philosophy to a great degree.

The issue at hand is this; math, logic, and programming, as well as science, rely on minimal language. Even if English is used to attain the goal, it’s a stripped-down, jargonized version, mostly supplementing diagrams and constructs that are clearly not a part of the English language; anyone who’s tried to read a paper in an unfamiliar field of study knows exactly what I mean. There’s often no way to actually translate these subjects directly into natural language without losing part of the meaning in translation.

These subjects, therefore, cut to the heart of what we referred to in the previous article as observational language. There is a coherent, one-to-one reference between a concept that can be coherently represented in these languages and a truth or an effective method; because of the minimal, precise syntax of these languages, a self-contradictory, untrue, or ineffective sentence can be made by definition invalid. Statements, especially in math or science, that are true in these languages would be said to be ‘true by correspondence’, that is, true because they correspond to a truth that actually exists.

In natural language, however, it is impossible to tightly and precisely formulate such things; instead, we end up with ‘truth by coherence’, or truth’s main consideration being that a set of sentences doesn’t contradict itself. Although we may lay over this a thin veneer of correspondence, the ambiguities and pitfalls of a maximal language prevent such truths from ever truly being unambiguously true.

The problem, then, for ethics, is that ethics relies unashamedly on maximal language; the very words of right and wrong, good and bad, value and worth, are all such imprecise, subjective, and even loaded terms that attempting to build an ethical system using a correspondence theory of truth that would apply to one’s own self is a nightmare.

Try and understand these concepts; the next article is going to build on them and cut to the heart of one of Quine’s most important studies.

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