Nick Laird in The Guardian on merging science with poetry:

How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms. What we do have is domestic analogies, and poems that reference outer space tend to tell us more about inner space - ourselves - than anything about the cosmos.

Any description of the deep underpinnings of science is likely to border on poetry or prose. As Laird says, the facts of the universe are so beyond our imagination that analogies are necessary to explain the world in anything but math. Thus any attempt to put the truth in layman’s terms is an attempt at poetry.

Also, Laird reminded me of perhaps my favorite two lines ever put together from the English language:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

(via Alexander Pope)

Molecule of the Day presents: L-Methamphetamine.

L-methamphetamine…is found in Vicks Vapor Inhalers. … This is the mirror image of D-methamphetamine - the street drug.

The thing is, L-methamphetamine isn’t really anything like the D-methamphetamine isomer that is found in street drugs. D-methamphetamine is psychoactive, while L-methamphetamine isn’t very psychoactive at all. In certain receptor and enzyme pockets where D-methamphetamine fits, L-methamphetamine fits like a left foot in a right shoe.

This is a post from 2006! That is to say: fromthearchives. Get used to it, the internet is being boring.

I first (roundaboutly) mentioned Karl Friston’s “unified theory of the brain” back in January. Now it is half a year later, and I still cannot say I am any further in gleaning any great understanding from his paper. Thankfully, New Scientist sums it up for the layman in this week’s issue.

Although we know tons and tons of details about the brain, we are almost completely lacking in ideas of how to connect all those details. Similar situations existed in physics and biology before the likes of Einstein and Darwin (respectively), and Karl Friston is attempting to follow in their footsteps by describing a simple theory that explains a wide range of neuroscience phenomenon.

Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses. … Instead of estimating the distance to an object as a number, for instance, the brain would treat it as a range of possible values, some more likely than others.

Importantly, these predictions are ever evolving. Any new information the brain receives influences the predictions, constantly minimizing error whenever possible. However, describing the brain as a “probability machine” has involved a number of different approaches, all of which would need to be tied together to create an overarching unified theory.

The WorldWide Telescope has been released.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

Green Porno - a feverishly hilarious look at sex in the natural world. I am especially partial toward the spider shenanigans; who knew I had sex the same way as in the insect kingdom?

Nature reports on two new studies showing that young children navigate the world using different information than adults:

Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.

Children over the age of eight showed results similar to adults on tasks in which information was available from various senses. In one study, sight and touch were used, and adults performed worst when only able to use sight or touch, and best when able to use both. However, children under the age of eight performed no differently.

“The results suggest that children don’t integrate, but instead ‘alternate’ between sources of information, [says developmental cognitive psychologist Virginia Slaughter.]”

Psychosocial and other cognitive development have been shown (billions of times) to continue much after birth, so these results are nothing shocking. But still, it is always interesting (and useful) to have experiments show behavioral correlates to the neural underpinnings.

Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Galaxies Gone Wild! (via kottke)

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Update: Cosmic Variance has a very moving goodbye post by one of Wheeler’s graduate students and friend.

A BMW forum has a great set of photos of the space shuttle processing, from shipment of the external fuel tank to liftoff. (Why it’s the car forums that always have these cool stories, I do not know.) Reminds me of a more localized version of the trip a 200-ton piece of a particle detector took from Deggendorf, Germany, to a laboratory in Karlsruhe, only 400 kilometers away.

Mentioned previously, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor spoke at TED on waking up one morning in the winter of 1996 after a blood vessel in her brain exploded. She chronicles the next four hours of her life from that point as she undergoes a massive stroke, slowly losing the ability to define the boundaries that separate one’s self from the infinite surroundings.

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

And then it crosses my mind: “But I’m a very busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine, OK.”

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work.

Luckily, Dr. Taylor was able to get to a hospital, and survived the stroke. Awakening after the surgery, though, she was shocked to find herself still alive, and still feeling some of the effects of the blood loss.

Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

Read the transcript or watch the video above.

The end of The Wire - SADLY, sadly, sadly, The Wire has come to an end. Jason Kottke wraps it up with a collection of recaps and reviews. Despite the show’s criticisms (and this final season toeing the line between ridiculous and absurd), I would readily argue these 5 seasons have been the best 5 seasons in television history (not counting MacGyver or Wings, of course). And also, *SPOILER ALERT*.

Can Scientists Dance? - A bevy of students, postdocs, and professors perform interpretive dances for their Ph.D. dissertations. Like Simone Recchi performing Dynamical and chemical evolution of blue compact dwarf galaxies a la Daft Punk’s “Around the World”.

Quote, Unquote - There has been a bit of discussion (read: ire) over the widespread use of “dumb quotes” (straight) over “smart quotes” (curved). Straight apostrophes denote inches and degrees and minutes and seconds, while curved apostrophes are used in conjunctions and quoting. There are a number of reasons to purposely use one or the other, but anything else is just laziness. Thankfully, Wordpress has me covered.

10 trends that will define logo design in 2008 - I guess it’s already time for another makeover.

Slide Show - “Are you ready for PowerPoint karaoke?” No.

How do you build a public library in the age of Google? - Slate.com photo essay on the changing architecture and role of public libraries. As digital content becomes more and more pervasive, there’s less need for a stuffy old library filled with nothing but books. Public libraries in major cities around the country are responding to this not only with new offerings (coffee shops, movie rentals, more computers) but with new architecture as well.

The 2008 Tournament of Books

In which we would seed the year’s most celebrated works of fiction in a March Madness-type bracket and pit those novels against each other in a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence.” In honor of our favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris’s brother, aka “The Rooster,” we decided to present the winning author with a live chicken.

About 13.7 billion years ago, our universe was born, and like some acne-ridden teenager going through puberty, it quickly expanded in size. Within hardly any time at all, the universe had gone from a little speck of nothingness to a vast wasteland of galaxies and Scientologists not much smaller than the universe today. (See Big Bang and cosmic inflation, respectively.)

Once we figured out the beginning, it wasn’t hard to guess the end. Inflation was done with, so it was all up to gravity. Basically, if the universe is dense enough (a lot of stuff in not too much space), then it should eventually collapse in a reversal of the Big Bang. Otherwise, space would continue expanding slowly into infinity and beyond. Or, if you’re an obsessive Albert Einstein, magical new quantities pop into existence and the universe, in turn, neither expands nor collapses.

(Un)fortunately(?), reality seems to be a little different. Instead of business as usual, or the universe heading toward the Big Crunch, expansion is accelerating. And eventually far-enough objects will be moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Ultimately, stars and galaxies will be moving away from us so quickly that light from them will never reach our eyes, as if they were never there to begin with.

Sad.

This places current scientists in a very interesting position:

Scientists in the far future, on some other planet without the benefit of our current knowledge, will see no evidence from their observations that the universe is expanding. After all, the only way that we know about it is by looking out at distant galaxies and tracing their motion. If they are out of sight, there will be no such tracers.

In other words, right now is the only time when both the expansion of the universe and its cause (dark energy) can be inferred. As the New Scientist article states, dark energy could not have been measured in the past, and the expansion will not be measurable in the future. And if we can predict that the sky will be a lot less informative for future scientists, what about today’s cosmologists?

We may never know if other fascinating and important aspects of our universe are hidden from us today, yet would have been visible had we been smart enough to evolve 5 billion years earlier.

Time travel never seemed more urgent.

The cover story in last week’s New Scientist asks, “2008: Does time travel start here?”

As you may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world’s first time machine.

Not surprisingly, the story quickly made its way to the news media. With such an exciting premise, not unlike the previous hysteria over micro black holes destroying the world, how could it not?

Unfortunately, these theories (hypotheses? conjectures? possibilities?) are more provocative than probable. Scientists accidentally creating a time machine? Or causing a reaction that devours the planet? Though backed by solid math, such scenarios are more the stuff of science fiction. And they frequently illuminate the media’s (and scientist’s) willingness to draw special attention to less significant science in the name of interest and readership.

Thankfully, New Scientist included in the same issue a commentary on the whole matter: Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?

Scientists, and people like me who stick up for science, are happy to pour scorn on astrologers, homeopaths, UFO-nutters, crop-circlers and indeed the Adam-and-Eve brigade, who all happily believe in six impossible things before breakfast with no evidence at all. Show us the data, we say to these deluded souls. Where are your trials? What about Occam’s razor - the principle that any explanation should be as simple as possible? The garden is surely beautiful enough, we say, without having to populate it with fairies.

The danger is that on the wilder shores of physics these standards are often not met either. There is as yet no observational evidence for cosmic strings. It’s hard to test for a multiverse. In this sense, some of these ideas are not so far, conceptually, from UFOs and homeopathy. If we are prepared to dismiss ghosts, say, as ludicrous on the grounds that firstly we have no proper observational evidence for them and secondly that their existence would force us to rethink everything, doesn’t the same argument apply to simulated universes and time machines? Are we not guilty of prejudice against some kinds of very unlikely ideas in favour of others?

Believing in ghosts takes a different mindset to advocating parallel worlds or cosmic strings. But do we really believe that we are all the creations of a computer sitting in some higher-dimensional adolescent’s bedroom, or that time travellers will land at the LHC? Or are we, too, seeing fairies at the bottom of the garden?

Basically, physics has reached a point where a lot of data is wildly divergent from what is well understood, and the theories invented to explain the data are often entirely unintuitive. Even old-hat theories like the Big Bang and inflation are extremely different than the world we are used to, and probably seemed unlikely when they were devised. But they are backed by hard data, and have allowed for some beautiful predictions. Mathematical credulity aside, where are the discussions of the probability and practicality of today’s sexy science?

This all reminds me of the (surprisingly mainstream) coverage of Boltzmann’s Brains. In explaining the silly idea in The New York Times, Dennis Overbye casually mentions this point:

Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however.

And as Sean of Cosmic Variance says:

The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology.

Or to put it another way, “It’s kind of an old-fashioned argument. Take a theory, use it to make a prediction, the prediction isn’t correct, and therefore the theory has been falsified!”

I appreciate Overbye mentioning that Boltzmann’s Brains are not believed to be how things really are, even if it was mentioned only in passing at the beginning. Many of the other ideas that make their rounds through the mainstream media are similarly insubstantial to most people in the field, and reporters should do more to make this point obvious. Sure, maybe the LHC will create a miniature black hole that destroys the world, but is the 0.0000000001% chance worthy of coverage?

Isn’t the real science titillating enough on its own?