Poetry

Maxwell’s Atlantic Telegraph

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Hearing about what broke the Falcon 1 rocket made me think of a poem I once heard, a poem by James Clerk Maxwell — yes, he of the Maxwell Equations. Called “The Song of the Atlantic Telegraph Company,” it was written to honour a transatlantic telegraph cable, or rather the failure of said cable to work. Maxwell’s friend William Thomson was an engineering consultant to Atlantic Telegraph, and when Maxwell heard that the cable-layers had failed to follow Thomson’s advice and thereby snapped their cable, he was inspired to versify.

(When the next attempt to lay a cable worked, Thomson became Lord Kelvin, and his name lives on in the Kelvin scale, which measures temperatures in units the size of Celsius degrees but starting at absolute zero.)

“List to the new words to a common song,” Maxwell wrote to a friend, “which I conceived on the railway to Glasgow. As I have only a bizzing, loose, interruption-to-talking- &-deathblow-to-general-conversation-memory of the orthodox version, I don’t know if the metre is correct; but it is some such rambling metre anyhow, and contains some insignificant though apparently treasonable remarks in a perfect thicket of vain repetitions.” For the sake of efficiency, Maxwell introduced the notation “2(u)” for the refrain, “Under the sea, under the sea.”

THE SONG OF THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY

I.
2(u)
Mark how the telegraph motions to me,
2(u)
Signals are coming along,
With a wag, wag, wag;
The telegraph needle is vibrating free,
And every vibration is telling to me
How they drag, drag, drag,
The telegraph cable along,
Continue reading Maxwell’s Atlantic Telegraph →

Quantum mechanics

Quantum One

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Michael Nielsen’s recent essay “Why the world needs quantum mechanics,” about the quintessential weirdness of quantum phenomena, provoked Dave Bacon to ask if there’s a better way to teach introductory courses in quantum physics. This question strikes a chord with me, since my first semester of college quantum — the class known as “8.04” — was rather remarkably dreadful.

It began with some fluff about early models of the atom, leaving out most of the ideas actually proposed in favor of a “textbook cardboard” version of the discoveries made in early TwenCen. If we can’t teach history well, why teach it at all? We’re certainly not promoting a genuine understanding of how science works if we only present a caricature of it. I doubt one could even instil an appreciation for the problems which Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and company solved in the years leading up to 1927: sophomore physics students can’t follow in their footsteps, because sophomore physics students don’t know as much classical physics as professional physicists of the 1920s did. To understand their starting point and the steps they took requires, oddly enough, subject material which even MIT undergrads don’t learn until later.
Continue reading Quantum One →

Statistical mechanics, String Theory

String Theory and Atomic Physics

Physics, as Clifford Johnson recently reminded us, has a strongly pragmatic side to its personality: “If that ten dimensional scenario describes your four dimensional physics and helps you understand your experiments, and there’s no sign of something simpler that’s doing as good a job, what do you care?” As that “ten dimensional” bit might suggest, the particular subject in question involves string theory, and whether tools from that field can be applied in places where they were not originally expected to work. From one perspective, this is almost like payback time: the first investigations of string theory, back in the 1970s, were trying to understand nuclear physics, and only later were their results discovered to be useful in attacking the quantum gravity problem. Now that the mathematical results of quantum-gravity research have been turned around and applied to nuclear physics again, it’s like coming home — déjà vu, with a twist.

This is quintessential science history: tangled up, twisted around and downright weird. Naturally, I love it.

Shamit Kachru (Stanford University) has an article on this issue in the American Physical Society’s new online publication, called simply Physics, a journal intended to track trends and illustrate highlights of interdisciplinary research. Kachru’s essay, “Glimmers of a connection between string theory and atomic physics,” does not focus on the nuclear physics applications currently being investigated, but rather explores a more recent line of inquiry: the application of string theory to phase transitions in big aggregates of atoms. Screwing around with lithium atoms in a magnetic trap is, by most standards, considerably more convenient than building a giant particle accelerator, so if you can get your math to cough up predictions, you can test them with a tabletop experiment.

(Well, maybe you’ll need a large table.)

If you’ve grown used to hearing string theory advertised as a way to solve quantum gravity, this might sound like cheating. Justification-by-spinoff is always a risky approach. It’s as if NASA said, “We’re still stalled on that going-to-the-Moon business, but — hey — here’s TANG!” But, if your spinoff involves something like understanding high-temperature superconductivity, one might argue that a better analogy would be trying for the Moon and getting weather satellites and GPS along the way.

Moreover, one should not forget that without Tang, we could not have invented the Buzzed Aldrin.

Bibliophilia

The Walking Dead

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I always prowled around the edges of science fiction. When I was fourteen years old, or thereabouts, I used up my fannishness on Isaac Asimov, which has left me with an all-too-encyclopædic knowledge of the whole Robot/Empire/Foundation business — the sort of story which they’ll never make into a movie, and which offers no opportunities to dress up as anybody. Now, I don’t have any passionate adoration left to spare for the stories which drive people mad, the ones which breed sub-sub-cultures and squirm like botflies in the brain. Taking film-studies classes to round out my humanities curriculum requirement left me watching Ghost in the Shell like a scholar.

(Or, worse yet, a poet.)

When I had time for fiction, I usually ended up among the authors who, you suspected, escaped the SF ghetto because they were more marketable outside than in. Late at night, in good company, the arguments would unfold over what exactly Kurt Vonnegut and Lois Lowry and Thomas Pynchon meant for the definition of SF, since the interesting problems with a definition always manifest at the edges. For a couple years, I had a subscription to Asimov’s, which I let lapse for the utterly humdrum reason that the stories in it never seemed to demand I make the time to read them. I felt episodically guilty about it — being such a nerd that I actually was seeking a career in science, shouldn’t I be keeping up with SF much better?

A beautiful and musical and cold-hearted young woman introduced me to Transmetropolitan, to illustrate what the graphic-novel format was capable of doing (Cosma Shalizi suggests, “[I]magine Hunter Thompson and John Brunner collaborating on the script for a movie to be filmed by Fritz Lang, Capra and John Carpenter, rendered by a Hogarth who has seen the future and loathes it”). This was my introduction to all things Warren Ellis, who — to make a long story much shorter — now argues that the numbers foretell doom for SF print magazines:

Cases are always made that in fact these magazines are on strong — or at least survivable — financial ground. Even ignoring the fact that the money they offer for fiction is pitiful, I think that matters less than that they are reaching massively fewer people every year. […] I live in hope that WEIRD TALES is preparing to post truly wonderful year-on-year figures. But, for the four magazines with available numbers (unless some communications failure has hidden a resurgence in INTERZONE numbers from the redoubtable Dozois)… it’s pretty much over.

As was stated over and over last year, any number of things could be done to help these magazines. But, naturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it.

Time to focus on the online magazines, he suggests, instead of the “walking dead.” How do you make an online rag profitable? (I let my subscription to Baen’s Universe lapse, too, so I’m the wrong guy to ask.) More fundamentally, how do you make such a site anything more than a “fanzine by any other name”?

Plectics, Popularization

Squaring Numbers Near Fifty

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And now, a brief break from non-blogging:

Today, I’d like to start with a specific example and move on to a general point. The specific example is a way to approximate the squares of numbers and then refine those approximations to get exact answers, and the general point concerns the place such techniques should have in mathematics education.

My last calculator broke years ago, so when I have to do a spot of ciphering, I have to work the answer out in my head or push a pencil. (If the calculation involves more numbers than can fit on the back of an envelope, then it’s probably a data-analysis job which is being done on a computer anyway.) Every once in a while, the numbers teach you a lesson, in their own sneaky way.

It’s easy to square a smallish multiple of 10. We all learned our times tables, so squaring a number from 1 to 9 is a doddle, and the two factors of 10 just shift the decimal point over twice. Thus, 502 is 2500, no thinking needed.

Now, what if we want to square an integer which is near 50? We have a trick for this, a stunt which first yields an answer “close enough for government work,” and upon refinement gives the exact value. (I use the “close enough for government” line advisedly, as this was a trick Richard Feynman learned from Hans Bethe while they were calculating the explosive power of the first atomic bomb, at Los Alamos.) To get your first approximation, find the difference between your number and 50, and add that many hundreds to 2500. The correction, if you need it, is to add the difference squared. Thus, 482 is roughly 2300 and exactly 2304, while 532 is roughly 2800 and exactly 2809.

I wouldn’t advise teaching this as “the way to multiply,” first because its applicability is limited and second because it’s, well, arcane. What a goofy sequence of steps! Surely, if we’re drilling our children on an algorithm, it should be one which works on any numbers you give it. The situation changes, though, after you’ve seen a little algebra, and you realize where this trick comes from. It’s just squaring a binomial:
Continue reading Squaring Numbers Near Fifty →

About this Blag, Video

In Which I Vacate

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OK, if anybody out there actually understands Manhattan, maybe you can help me. Here’s the situation: you’re at the American Museum of Natural History, or in other words, 81st Street and Central Park West, and you’ve got to get to the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery, where the Chinatown bus is leaving. The B train is not running. Is there a better way than to ride the C train all the way to Canal Street and then play dodge-the-pedestrians from the south of Soho into Chinatown, weaving through the bobbing umbrellas and the vendors selling improbable knockoffs of everything that shines, as the summer rain begins to fall upon you?

I always get to have the strangest kinds of fun when I visit New York City.

Joshua, Rebecca “NSFW” Watson and I rode down from Boston yesterday morning, ostensibly to attend Lori Lipman Brown‘s talk for the NYC Skeptics, but we arrived too late and were only able to attend the drinking which happened afterwards, coincidentally beginning when Rebecca showed up (for reasons I do not purport to understand). The following eight hours passed hazily by, in the aptly-named Social Bar.

The cheese fries were good, the crab dip not so much. Our waitress did a very good job keeping the Skepchick contingent supplied with libations, and she did yeoman (yeoperson?) service in getting the bar to follow our scribbled instructions for making skeptically-themed drinks: the Buzzed Aldrin, the Moon Hoax, the Sylvia Browne. . . .

I must admit that when I was a teenager reading books by Carl Sagan and company, I did not expect “skepticism” as an intellectual movement to involve showing up at a bar and starting to drink at four in the afternoon.

Anyway, with the weekend well and truly wasted, I’m back in the Greater MIT Metropolitan Area, where the computer I left behind has finished a run of number-crunching and given me something interesting in the results. I’m going to take off a few days and poke these analyses to see what else they’ve got — the SCIENCE IN PROGRESS light is tentatively flashing in my spine. (I’ve also realized that I’ve had a few too many pointless arguments in different corners of the science blagotubes in recent weeks, so I should take a bit to do something more productive with my time. You’re all still wrong, though.) I recognize that I owe at least two people book reviews, and readers have sent me some items of woo that might well be worth debunking, but there’s only so much caffeine a brain can hold. . . .

BPSDB, Evolution, Favorites, Plectics, Video

The Strident and The Shrill

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BPSDBRichard Dawkins and PZ Myers had a lengthy, informal chat during the 2008 American Atheists conference in Minneapolis, and a recording of their conversation is now available on DVD and in the video tubes. They discuss the fight against pseudoscience as well as several interesting topics in good science.

I did my best to summarize the kin-vs.-group business in this book review. Among the “glimmerings” which suggest there’s a better way to think about some evolutionary processes (name for that better way still to be defined) are, I think, the epidemiological simulations in which fitness of a genotype is clearly a function of ecology and thus strongly time-dependent, and consequently existing analysis techniques are likely to fail. Assuming this kind of thing happens in the real world, it might be better to speak of “extending the evolutionary stable strategies concept” or “temporally extended phenotypes” than to have yet another largely semantic argument over “group selection.”

Also of note:

When Dawkins spoke at the first artificial life conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1987, he delivered a paper on “The Evolution of Evolvability.” This essay argues that evolvability is a trait that can be (and has been) selected for in evolution. The ability to be genetically responsive to the environment through such a mechanism as, say, sex, has an enormous impact on one’s evolutionary fitness. Dawkins’s paper has become essential reading in the artificial life community.

Anyway, on with the show.

P-Zed wrote an introduction to allometry a little over a year ago.
Continue reading The Strident and The Shrill →

Evolution, Statistical mechanics, String Theory

Meanwhile, on the Intertubes

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The evilutionary superscientist P-Zed has been trying to drive the riffraff away from his website by writing about biology. First we had “Epigenetics,” and now we’ve got “Snake segmentation.” Meanwhile, Clifford Johnson is telling us about “Atoms and Strings in the Laboratory” (with bonus musical accompaniment). Stick around for stupid questions from me in the comments!

(Everything I know is really just the sum total of answers I’ve received for stupid questions.)

Wobosphere fun

Responsum Aucili

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Gosh, I’ve forgotten a lot of Latin, but I think it goes like this.

Accusaties impudentes Dawkinsi deliberavi, et is inopia litterarum gravium me exacerbavit. Sermes magnarum singularum Roderigi Hispalis, de coriis conquisitis externisque caligarum Imperatorum non legavit, per speciem, neque consideratiem donat brevem opo summa laude dignum Bellini, De Plumis Illustris Petasæ Imperatorem. Scholas totas consecratas ut libos doctos de pulchritude vestimentum Imperatoris scribans habeamus, et acta diurna omnia magna pars de more regio comprehendant. Dawkinsus totum inflate dimittat. Etiam cachinnat ad disputaties gratiosissimas suaviloquentissimasque civis eius, Mawkscribblerius, qui clare monstravit Imperatorem aut gyssypium vulgare aut polyesteram molestam non gerat, sed subucula bombycis subtilissimæ gerenda Imperatori est.

Dawkinsus hæc reputanda alta philosopha arrogane prætereit, ut Imperatorem rude accuset nudi.
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Poetry

The Bystander

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Dammit, people, stop giving me opportunities to post poetry.

On my soul a deep infection preyed,
A burden cold of contradiction laid
Upon my heart so fickle and so weak,
That from my path I almost strayed

And in a flamewar nearly took a part!
Never can I end what others choose to start,
So learned I did the proper time to speak
And when to silent case my verbal dart,

For when the bloggers act like drama queens,
And trick like idols dying to be seen,
No matter what the course I seek
I only worse the dismal scene!

But perhaps I can not-quite-waste my time
If I turn to slapdash meter and obtrusive rhyme. . . .

(Originally posted at the Cuttlefish’s place.)

Poetry

Boy Seeks Razorgirl

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I hereby establish a new tradition: when too much of the Internet (or the parts thereof which I follow regularly) seems to have switched into Whiny Drama Queen mode, I will post a poem. I wrote the first octet of this one while trapped in a particularly dreadful meeting, and I finished it during a recent flirtation with insomnia.

BOY SEEKS RAZORGIRL: CYBERPUNK LOVE

She slows her heart while on a sniper run
And fires between the beats for steady aim;
She kills with art and grace and flechette gun,
With wire and shuriken mere doll or dame
Could never wield with such finality —
Her curves machined so men will trembling faint
False pleasure yield and sketch carnality
By siren sheen and most alluring paint.
My ghost was trapped within her cunning maze
When first we crossed upon the seething Net
Where console cowboys jack their country ways
And flatline burns the ICE as black as jet.
Her Jarvik I now set my cap to win,
For she who stands alone let all begin.

"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"