Friday, December 18th, 2009
Matt and I were at the very enjoyable and good value for money Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People last night. It had quite a furtive geeky atmosphere which I wasn’t expecting, but on reflection that does make sense. Science and atheism seem more embattled in the public and media domain than they ought to be really. You can’t move without bumping into something homeopathic, religious, science-denying or superstitious these days. Irrationalism is on the march!
But it wasn’t at the UCL Bloomsbury last night. It was a marvellous bill, a mix of comedy, music and informative lecture. There was Robyn Hitchcock doing his droll slightly mad monologues and a song about trilobites. There was Johnny Ball doing dirty old man jokes and being contagiously enthusiastic about the amount of amazing knowledge we have at our fingertips in this country. The boyish and clever Baba Brinkman did an amazing rap re-working Dead Prez’s “I’m a African” so that it was a self-reflective ode to evolution and common humanity. Barry Cryer got us all on our feet screaming “peace and quiet” over and over again. Josie Long explored with us what ghosts might eat (if we were foolish enough to believe in them of course).
My favourite one was fast talking and enthusiastic physicist Brian Cox, who is working at the Large Hadron Collider. He gave a presentation about simplicity and complexity in the universe, about very very big things and very very small things. He pointed out how everything in the universe is made of just a few elementary leptons and quarks, glued together by just four forces.
There was a great bit quite reminiscent of the old Powers of Ten video where he used Hubble pictures to zoom into one piece of the night sky, the size of a 5p coin. As you zoomed in, what was empty space filled up with growing specks of light. Each speck of light was in fact a galaxy, there are over 100 billion galaxies each containing over 100 billion stars. The universe is indeed extremely big.
Brian also showed us some stirring pictures of Earth from space. One was the famous 1968 picture of our world from the moon, the picture that is sometimes said to have launched the environmental movement.
The picture I hadn’t seen before, but which moved me greatly, was the farthest away picture of the Earth, taken by Voyager from 4 billion miles away as it left the Solar System. It’s the little dot in the photo below.
Brian then made a plea not to cut funding for the kind of scientific research that leads us to explore these vast distances, pointing out simply that it helps us to understand ourselves. Much as an archaeologist or anthropologist studies the farthest reaches of human history or cultural variation in order to shed light on our own condition.
He ended with a TS Eliot quote from the Four Quartets, which did actually make me cry.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
Ah, one of those marvellous New Scientist physics stories. I love reading these.
Well apparently, a German gravitational wave detector has been picking up readings that fit with an interesting theoretical idea: we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram in which reality is somewhat blurry.
You see, there’s a level of smallness at which the fabric of space-time stops looking like a smooth continuum and instead becomes grainy, with reality dissolving into tiny units like the dots that make up a photograph. This is what we doctors call very very small, a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length and measures 10-35 metres; it is said to be the smallest distance or size about which anything can be known.
The holographic universe idea suggests that this fundamental unit of reality is much bigger than this. It builds on the insight that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon of black holes can encode the information inside the black hole, about the star that formed it. This means that the three dimensional information about the precursor star is completely encoded in the two dimensional event horizon of a black hole, much as the 3D image of a hologram is etched on 2D plastic film.
Extend this principle to the whole universe and the cosmos can be thought of as a sphere, the outer surface of which is coated in Planck length sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information on the surface must match the amount of information contained inside: yet the volume of a spherical object is much bigger than its outer surface. In order to have the same number of bits of information inside the universe as on the outside, a holographic universe must be made up of fundamental units bigger than the Planck length, it’s blurry, with grains around 10-16 metres in length. Which means that highly sensitive experiments might be able to detect this blurriness.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? Although I do find these physics stories utterly baffling. You read them and then come out the other end unsure of what it all means. I have enough of a grounding in biology and anthropology to be able to put these kind of articles in context, I know where they fit within a well established body of knowledge and I know roughly to what extent new evidence and hypotheses change the ebb and flow of broader discussions.
With the holographic universe I have no idea to what extent it is a crazy fringe idea, or a reasonably well grounded hypothesis. Still, it’s great fun to read. Clearly, volume is illusory and we are all information inscribed on the surface of our boundary. That must be that membrane I kept catching sight of when I was on salvia!
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Saturday, January 19th, 2008
We went to the spacious and graceful Wellcome Collection today to see their exihibtion on Sleeping and Dreaming.
It’s one of the most effortlessly engaging museums I’ve ever visited, beautifully appointed and laid out, awash with money, its centrepiece being a sort of anthropological history of health and medicine, told through a selection of fascinating objects from Henry Wellcome’s massive Victorian collection. The objects really draw you in: artificial limbs, a Chinese torture chair, a painting of a Victorian 40 stone man who toured the country charging people 5 shillings to see his remarkable fatness – the reality TV of his day! – a shrunken head, Charles Darwin’s whalebone walking stick with a little skull handle, a set of bellows for treating drowned people who needed resuscitating by blowing tobacco up their rectum, a box of Japanese sex aids, and so on…
We were there for Sleeping and Dreaming, a fascinating look at the art and science of sleeping and dreaming. Lots of wonderful stuff in there: unusual alarm clocks, a selection of recorded lullabies from different cultures, a man with a terrible genetic disease – fatal familial insomnia – that rendered him unable to sleep and soon killed him, lots of dream-inspired and surrealist
art, a section dedicated to Japanese inemuri, “sleeping while present” or power napping.
One of the coolest bits looks at stuff that somehow coalesced through dreaming: Tartini’s famous Devil’s Trill Sonata which he maintained never matched the beauty of what he had heard the devil play in his dream; the periodic table of elements which appeared fully formed to Dmitri Mendeleev in a dream; Yesterday by Paul McCartney; the ring formula of Benzene which Kekulé realised after a dream of a snake eating its own tail; and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which he wrote down straight after an opium reverie before being interrupted, remaining a fragment.
There’s some handy advice on how best to manage jet lag (light is key), a look at the different theories about why we sleep and dream and many more surprising insights and little details. Check it out!
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