Once Upon a Time . . .

e=mc^?

There was a problem . . .

But the problem was solved: e=mc^2

And they all lived happily ever after . . .

Thawed-Out Neanderthal

Unfrozen Caveman

Google Images

A day or so ago, a physicist friend of mine from the Ozarks who works for Beyond Photonics sent an email to me and a lady-friend diplomat, whom I'll refer to as "Dee," also from the Ozarks, saying this:

Hi Bruce and Dee,

I'm sorry, but when I happened across this headline in the local Boulder paper this morning, I was constitutionally unable to keep from making the following connection:

Pope Benedict XVI resigns Thursday, now 'simple pilgrim' . . .

One of my personal all-time favorite Phil Hartman bits [was his 'simple' Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer] (along with his genius take on Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office with the Girl Scouts, etc. . . .)

See you -- Charley P.

I didn't know my name was "Bruce" . . . or am I "Dee"? Whatever. I replied:

Dammit, Pete, are you inferring that I look like a Neanderthal?!

What's that? Don't I mean "implying"? Huh? Just what are you trying to infer? That I can't spell? Well, I may be a simple hillbilly, but I did learn how to spell, and I know that "inferring" is not spelled "i-m-p-l-y-i-n-g."

So, take that and stick it somewhere beyond photonics!

Oddly enough, my physicist friend took inexplicable offense:

HO!

Now Jeff, I did not come within 161 km of implying that you look like the Pope, and you know it!!

Boy oh boy, touchy frickin' expat, I tell you what. Jeez! And also, that Pope dude is really quite a handsome old fellow just for good measure, I think. So there.

But seriously, I take any opportunity I can get to invoke the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. (Well, not that it comes up very often, but come on, that was too good to pass up . . .) That Phil Hartman, he was da bomb. I hope he's keeping everybody in stitches, whereever he is.

I like your take on BP's name. I have to call people up frequently to buy things, get quotes, etc., and half the people when I tell them our name, think the company is "Beyond Phonics" -- ha. But I'm getting used to it. Have a great weekend, or whatever weird foreign thing you guys have over there -- Pete

At least, he called me "Jeff" . . . even if he does think the pope is handsome and that I look nothing like the pope (ex-pope). Wonder what that 161 km is about . . . . Anyway, Dee then offered her input:

Lawyers, Popes, and cavemen. Same playbook. Find someone slower and take whatever they've got.

Not very diplomatic of her, so I replied, more bluntly than usual:

I can't speak for lawyers or popes, but my fellow cavemen were the ones truly left behind. I'm the only Neanderthal who's survived, and your modern world frightens and terrifies me. For instance, should I invest my money in Apple . . . or in Samsung? Both companies have been criticized for their business practices, so investing in one or the other is a scaaaary thing. Now, I'm just a simple Neanderthal, but an honest Neanderthal, like me, wants to make the ethical choice. For that, however, I need inside information. Nothing complex, just advance knowledge of a new, breakthrough technology that will send the company's stock sky-high. If I only knew that, I'd know where to put my money, namely, in that particular company, for its business practices are bringing on a better future by bringing in the money. And that fits perfectly with my personal ethics. Buy low, sell high is my moral motto. And with the fortune I'd make, I could secure the future of my family. No one can deny the ethics of that. Plus, I'd be a model for any future unfrozen Neanderthals, an inspiration that they, too, can make it in this frightening, terrifying modern world. Again, ethical. But that's me, I just ooze ethics all over.

There. Honest folks can now see where I stand! Less than honest folks will suffer doubts . . .

Don't you lecture me!

NPR Logo

Readers will perhaps recall that I taught a history course last spring on European integration -- rather pertinent, as recent events reveal -- and that I used an innovative (for me) technique. Rather than lecture -- which I knew from experience would be a waste of time (me speaking English to a class for whom it's mostly a second language) -- I divided the class into nine groups of about six students each and had them spend the first twenty minutes discussing several questions that had been posted online a couple of days before. We then followed this with about forty minutes of class-wide discussion. The process worked much better, I thought, than any lecture that I'd ever given. But that was merely my impression, one unbased on hard evidence.

Now, however, I have some factual evidence, quantitative even! Emily Hanford, for NPR, tells us in "Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool" (January 1, 2012) that discussion is the best method:

[Eric] Mazur's physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

At a recent class, the students -- nearly 100 of them -- are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students start talking with one another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got it right. After talking for a few minutes, Mazur tells them to answer the question again.

This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer. The process then begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls "peer Instruction." He now teaches all of his classes this way.

"What we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple," he says.

One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don't need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading -- what he calls the "information-gathering" part of education -- before they come to class.

That's the hard part, getting them to prepare! But if they do, this method works wonders. Of course, the results are different for history, compared to physics, but the students do learn to develop their ideas and analysis through discussion, which leads to improved research papers, due to better developed views.

I'd write more on this topic, but I'm using a different computer than my own, familiar one because of internet-link problems this morning, so go to the link to learn more.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking

Photo by Judith Croasdell

(Image from MSNBC)

Alan Boyle, writing for MSNBC, asks "Is the grand design within our grasp?" By which, he means to say, has the unified theory of everything been found? Do we finally have GUT, the Grand Unified Theory? The theory that puts even God in the place of unnecessary hypotheses?

Well, I don't know, so interested readers will just have to go to the link and see what they think, but I do have a question about something -- or rather, nothing -- that Boyle reports on in the claims of Lawrence Krauss, Leonard Mlodinow, and Stephen Hawking. Boyle especially cites Krauss:

What Krauss finds exciting is that there could be ways to verify that something can come from nothing -- which is the point behind Hawking's claim that God isn't necessary to explain the universe's creation.

Physicists have noted that the positive energy contained in particles and the negative energy represented by gravitational attraction appear to balance out precisely. "Empirically, we can actually have evidence that the universe came from nothing. One of the key things is that the total energy of the universe is zero, which is only possible if the universe came from nothing. It could have been otherwise. It could have been not zero," Krauss said.

The concept of a zero-energy universe and getting something from nothing may sound crazy, but this article from Mercury magazine and this video of one of Krauss' lectures, both titled "A Universe From Nothing," show that the ideas has (have) been percolating among scientists for years. Such ideas are central to "The Grand Design," as well as to the book that Krauss is currently in the midst of writing.

In an interview that Boyle offers at the bottom of the article, Mlodinow adds to what Krauss has said:

As far as God goes, we describe our theory of where the universe came from, and why the laws of nature are as they are. And we show that with this theory, there's no need for a God to create the universe or to create the laws of physics as they are. All of this can come purely from physics, from science, from nature.

Sounds like Pierre-Simon Laplace redux: "Sire, I have not need of that hypothesis," Laplace reportedly informed Napoleon, when the latter asked why God wasn't mentioned in his celestial mechanics.

Anyway, my postponed question is this: What do Hawking and the others mean here by "nothing"? It actually sounds like an unstable something that can fracture into an exact balance of "positive energy contained in particles and . . . negative energy represented by gravitational attraction." As such, this original 'nothing' would appear to have had some sort of ontological status, a 'nothing' that exists.

Is this the only concept of "nothing" that is possible? Wouldn't a more radical concept of nothing insist on absolute nothingness, which does not exist, rather than a 'nothing' that does exist? We're talking metaphysics, not physics, and I wonder if Hawking and his fellow physicists aren't perhaps equivocating on the term "nothing." One might as well claim that 'nothing' is sacred because it is 'Creator' of the universe!

I suspect that my cyber-friend, Bill Vallicella, would have some choice words on this 'scientific' issue. He's already had some thoughts about nothing . . .

Second Ether and the Multiverse?

Multiverse

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've learned from Mr. Carter Kaplan -- in a couple of blog comments and emails -- that the "Second Ether" concept in his novel Tally-Ho, Cornelius! is borrowed from Michael Moorcock's literary fiction. From Kaplan's own novel, I had made the connection to the multiverse of modern physics and philosophy -- for Peter Forrest and I used to discuss the multiverse during my three years at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia.

To further my knowledge of the Second Ether, Mr. Kaplan offered a link to a piece that he wrote on the concept and published in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 2008), but the link is to a site on the 'Multiverse', and I -- for some reason, perhaps my insufficiently evolved state -- cannot enter the 'Multiverse, as I explain:

For some reason, . . . the 'multiverse' links that I've seen always return me to the homepage for Yahoo. I've noticed this in trying to access Michael Moorcock's site. If I Google his name and then click on 'multiverse', I end up at Yahoo. Baffling. I suppose that I've not evolved sufficiently to enter the Second Ether.

But I invite my readers to test Kaplan's link and report back from the Second Ether of the multiverse if they can . . . and try Moorcock's larger site for that matter. I'm still assuming that the concept is a riff on the original, first ether of pre-Einsteinian physics, with a debt to the old, Medieval concept of the etherial quintessence.

Let me know . . .

Physical Fitnas?

Large Hadron Collider

The fitna to end all fitnas!

(Image by Valerio Mezzanotti for the NYT)

We may seem to be headed for that much debated clash of civilizations that Samuel Huntington has written about, but Dennis Overbye, writing for the International Herald Tribune (March 29, 2008), reports on a new technological development might offer the solution to all our problems:

More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar.

None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men . . . in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth -- and maybe the universe.

Wouldn't that be a beaut of a fitna! A fitna ending, one might say. Unfortunately for us, this probably won't happen:

Scientists say that is very unlikely -- though they have done some checking just to make sure.

But if it were to happen, it would be a most appropriate deus ex machina ringing down a final curtain on the whole sorry drama.

It would also take care of my flu, a case severe enough to warrent such world-shaking intervention . . . in my humble opinion, of course.