Natural Magic

Robin says,

Reading "The Revolution in Science 1500-1750" by A. Rupert Hall and absolutely loved this line:

Quite how the authentic philosophy of Plato [...] became the father of natural magic -- magical operations without the aid of demons -- seems to be somewhat obscure.

"Magical operations without the aid of demons"! So awesome! "Hey, uh, listen, so if you want to do some magic... but you don't have any demons... try science!"

I'm enjoying the tone of the book. Hall isn't afraid to make positive value-judgments about the scientific worldview (because, he says, that view actually does provide more useful, more complete theories about the world) but at the same time, he doesn't fail to detail all the weird, religious, dogmatic, and/or occult motivations of many early scientists: Vesalius! Mondino! Paracelsus!

Save the Earth, Read a Paper

Matt says,

Chris Anderson does a back-of-the-envelope carbon footprint calculation for an issue of Wired vs. the same issue online. The results surprised me. (Of course, it being Chris Anderson, it's certainly not as back-of-the-envelope as it comes off; he drops some mad knowledge in the commentz.)

Universe-Hunting

Robin says,

I admit it: I pre-ordered Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science on Amazon.com back in the day... got it the day it came out... and was totally bewildered. I ended up selling it to a used book store.

But I still like the core ideas, to the extent I understand them, which is not much. The crude version is: Stephen Wolfram likes cellular automata, or simple rulesets that, when run recursively, produce interesting and surprisingly complex results, especially when you get them two, three, or more dimensions. In fact he thinks all of math and science (!) has fallen too deeply in the thrall of the equation -- not necessarily a very "natural" thing -- and has completely missed the potential analytic and explanatory power of the cellular automata.

Anyway, the point is, it's provocative even if I don't really get it, and so is his latest blog post:

Of course, as early theologians pointed out, the universe clearly has some order, some "design". It could be that every particle in the universe has its own separate rule, but in reality things are much simpler than that.

But just how simple? A thousand lines of Mathematica code? A million lines? Or, say, three lines?

If it's small enough, we really should be able to find it just by searching. And I think it'd be embarrassing if our universe is out there, findable by today's technology, and we didn't even try.

Of course, that's not at all how most of today's physicists like to think. They like to imagine that by pure thought they can somehow construct the laws for the universe--like universe engineers.

So it's basically theory via Google: Instead of deducing the laws of the universe, you arrive at them via computational brute force. Just try every combination of simple rules you can think of 'til you get something that looks like physics! Easy!

Great images in the post, too, as always. Wolfram famously self-published his book (actually, it's even better: He founded a new company to publish it) because he couldn't find any existing publishers willing or able to reproduce his illustrations at the resolution he demanded. Awesome.

Disease Resistance for the Weekend

Robin says,

We mostly think of individuals as the units of natural selection. When it comes to disease resistance, the unit might actually be the family. That's cool.

One Big Species

Robin says,

Over in the New York Review of Books, and apropos of nothing, Freeman Dyson talks up our biotech future. It gets pretty utopian towards the end, but it's a scintillating read all the same.

This bit is near the beginning:

[Carl Woese] is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

Just a theory... but wow, what a theory!

Don't forget: previous biotech madness.

Brain-Hurt of the Day

Matt says,

From Elizabeth Kolbert's lovely article about CERN's giant Hadron Collider:

It is one of the paradoxes of particle physics that fundamental particles, though pointlike and indivisible, are also generally unstable. In fact, the heavier particles are so short-lived that even to speak of their having an existence seems faintly ludicrous; a top quark, for example, is estimated to last no more than 1 × 10¯²⁴ seconds. (For comparison’s sake, 1 × 10¯²⁴ centuries comes to three millionths of a billionth of a second.)

Print It Out, Fold It Up (But Only in Three Dimensions, Please)

Robin says,

Ooh: SEED has a PDF cribsheet on string theory. I didn't know I needed that 'til just now.

But wait: There are loads of these cribsheets!

Old Man Minsky

Robin says,

An interesting (and short) interview with Marvin Minsky over in Discover this month. This passage from page two is provocative:

[Your new book] "The Emotion Machine" reads like a book about understanding the human mind, but isn't your real intent to fabricate it?

The book is actually a plan for how to build a machine. I'd like to be able to hire a team of programmers to create the Emotion Machine architecture that's described in the book -- a machine that can switch between all the different kinds of thinking I discuss. Nobody's ever built a system that either has or acquires knowledge about thinking itself, so that it can get better at problem solving over time. If I could get five good programmers, I think I could build it in three to five years.

From a little later on:

Has science fiction influenced your work?

It's about the only thing I read. General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Also, Minsky says wistfully of the old Bell Labs: "I worked there one summer, and they said they wouldn't work on anything that would take less than 40 years to execute."

Unhappy Meals

Matt says,

Michael Pollan, whose Omnivore's Dilemma may have been my favorite book of last year, has an excellent essay in today's New York Times Magazine.

Climate Is a Mental Construct

Matt says,

Clive Thompson asks the question of whether the U.S. is geographically unable to perceive global warming. Of course, I'm in Minnesota in January and my lake is still liquid, which suggests the answer is "No."

Liquid!! There are still ducks on it!!

Animals Dream

Matt says,

I mean, it makes sense, but I'd never really given it much thought. I remember seeing my dogs twitch in their sleep and saying, "Aww, they must be dreaming." But I guess I didn't really believe it, or I didn't really follow the thought through to its conclusion. But I find the image of a dreaming rat retracing its steps through a maze to be a little sad and, er, poignant. Am I a sap?