Listening to a BBC podcast recently it seemed that the experts were agonising about the nature of time. But isn’t time just our way of describing change? Not a thing in and of itself but rather a description of real things going from one state to another?
Perhaps I’ve missed a trick somewhere along the way. If so, enlighten me.
I picked up Feynman’s 1964 book, Six Easy Pieces the other day. It has been released as part of a new collection of reprints from Penguin that sell for just NZ$12.95 each and, at that price, I’ll read just about anything.
And what a pleasant surprise!
This is a book about physics which would be enough to put most people off right from the start but it has a few things going for it. Firstly, it’s a pretty thin book (only 138 pages) which, combined with the word ‘easy’ in the title, reassures you that even if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew at least it will all be over in short order. Secondly, it’s written by the late Richard Feynman who, by all accounts was one of the smartest physicists of recent time as well as a damn fine artist and bongo player to boot.
The book is aimed at people who, like me, have a high school understanding of physics but little else. But I’m sure that whether you only vaguely understand that our world is made of atoms or you daydream about quantum entanglement, you’ll find this an entertaining and enlightening read.
As the title suggests, the book is broken into six chapters, each derived from lectures he gave at Caltech. The first, Atoms in Motion for me was perhaps the most staggering. It neatly explains how atoms work and how these workings relate to everything from heat to chemical structures and even why ice expands when cold while just about everything else contracts. Second is Basic Physics which gives a brief history of our understanding of the way the universe works and introduces an enormously useful analogy of science being like observers of a celestial chess game where we begin to notice patterns and rules but are nowhere near able to actually play the game ourselves because every once in a while we observe something completely left-field the equivalent of castling. Third is The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences where we see that the behaviour of atoms helps to explain the behaviour of chemicals which helps to explain the behaviour of rocks and living things. Fourth is Conservation of Energy which gets pretty mathematical but explains the relationship between the law and most (all?) of the equations that underpin physics as well as showing why the recently popular claims of free energy simply can’t happen. Fifth is The Theory of Gravitation which, after explaining the history behind our discoveries ends up concluding that we still have no idea what gravity is. And sixth and finally, the moment everyone waits for, Quantum Behaviour. Feynman walks us through analogies of experiments with particles and waves and then goes on to show that, at the level of the atom, nothing behaves like we expect it to. He shows that the maths is reliable but that we just can’t reconcile it with our natural understanding of the physical world. But all throughout the book he has been highlighting just how much we don’t know and this somehow turns my potential despair at quantum behaviour into a kind of exciting challenge that we can still make headway but that we might have to rely a little less on intuition and more on the evidence provided by experimentation.
In summary, if you spot the rack of bright orange books in your local bookstore, keep an eye out for this one and grab it if you can. It’ll only take a moment out of your life and, if you are only ever going to read one book about physics, this is definitely the book you should read. (I also managed to pick up Pinker’s The Language Instinct from the same collection too – that’s next on my list after I finish Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale and Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel).
I’m growing a cucumber plant at the moment and have noticed an interesting phenomenon; every so often it will put out a long, straight, skinny tendril which it uses to cling onto things as it grows. Everyone knows about this, you see it happening with peas and beans as well.
But do you realise just how fast this happens? The photo above is the result of only an hour or so of contact with the bamboo pole that I adjusted this morning. It boggles my mind to think what processes must be involved that cause the cells that come into contact with something to contract so rapidly. You could literally touch your finger to a straight tendril and have it cling to you over the span of a couple of cups of tea.
Dawkins’ series The Genius of Charles Darwin is currently showing on the History Channel on Sky here in NZ. Omitted from the series was this insightful interview with Father George Coyne on the subjects of evolution, cosmology, science and faith.
I’ve heard that snails and slugs will avoid broken egg shells and therefore that they (the egg shells) can be used to protect seedlings. I tested this claim by putting a snail out on the dirt and in the sun surrounded by broken egg shells. As you can see by the image the shells didn’t work.
I’ll run this test again once I get more shells with which I’ll make a more robust barrier.
(I wonder if snails would be similarly deterred by a ring of crushed snail shells?)
Nihil est agricultura melius nihil uberius
Nihil dulcius nihil homine libero dignius.“Nothing is better, more fruitful, more pleasant
and more worthy of a free man, than agriculture”.- Cicero (106BCE-43BCE)
(Today I completed my new vegetable garden. I’m exhausted but happier and more fulfilled than I’ve been in a long time.)
If you have a moment and you feel so inclined, please take a minute to fill out a survey on the public understanding of evolution which is being run by Michael Shermer & co. I’m not sure what data they hope to garner or for what purpose but they provide you with the opportunity to be emailed the results once they’ve finished.
In recent conversations with theists I’ve come across a common objection to the possibility of free will if there be no supernatural dimension to the world in which we live. The argument goes along the lines of:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. We experience free will so there must be more to this world than just matter
an alternative is:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. Under the materialistic worldview we can’t ultimately have free will
I’ve heard this argument couched in numerous ways but the essence of it is that if our smallest bits don’t have free will then we can’t explain the freedom we appear to experience.
I can think of two answers to this.
The first (which I’m not personally convinced of) would be that we only have the appearance of freedom and that, as participants, we are able to fool ourselves into thinking we have control over what we do. My analogy for this is where the desperate dog-owner repeatedly tries to tell their disobedient dog to sit and when they finally notice that the dog is about to sit of its own accord, quickly say “sit!” in order to give themselves the feeling of being in control. This would make what we experience as free will a kind of a self-deception and, like I said, I’m not convinced this is the case but it is a valid answer to the first problem pointed out above. (Although, I must say that I think there is some truth to this at times, especially when it comes to self-justification).
The second, and far more powerful, option is to look at the analogy of music. Take a CD of your favourite musician and if we look closely we’ll see that the ‘music’ is made of only on or off states. 0s or 1s. When we play a CD we experience music but when we look at what this music (on a CD) is made of we can see that it’s just binary bits. And as we all know, a 0 or a 1 is not in itself music. This second argument would suggest that both free will and music are the emergent properties of their component parts doing something.
In the second set of arguments above I italicised the word ultimately. My analogy of music also helps to address the logical fallacy of the usage of this word. I don’t believe there is such a thing as ultimate music. Nor do I believe there is such a thing as ultimate free will. I believe that both are subjectively experienced and are results of non-free and non-musical atoms and bits doing something. We experience free will just as we experience music.
The use of the word ‘ultimate’ in this argument tries to imply that there are only two kinds of free will; ultimate free will or no free will at all. This is a false dichotomy. I would argue that there is at least another type of free will and that is the kind that is experienced subjectively and is only explainable at the macro level of bundles of atoms that are doing something. A world within a world. And using the music analogy once again, you can see how silly this argument is when I say “There is only either ultimate music or no music at all”.
“Free will” is a word that we’ve made up to describe an aspect we observe of the world around us. We have a tendency to want our words and categories to clearly demarcate things we observe into black/white, on/off, etc. But sometimes the words we invent fail at a point when the thing we are describing is a gradient, like ‘red’ (when does red become orange?) or ‘alive’ (are viruses alive? is fire alive?) or ‘music’ (is a ‘chirp’ music? what about a vibration on a violin string? or wind in the trees?). Free will is one of these words. We can observe a gradient of organisms with various abilities to do things. Free will is a gradual and emergent process and to treat it as a binary state is to become a slave to a simplistic understanding of the world and to imperfect vocabulary.
Yesterday, after eight weeks of training, I ran in the Auckland Half Marathon. When I started I wasn’t able to run for more than 20 minutes without having to stop. Within just six weeks I had already managed to complete a full training run of the 21km required for the half marathon non-stop and without having to be taken away in an ambulance.
I have to say it’s quite liberating getting over that initial hurdle of becoming fit enough to run continuously (within limits!) and was surprised at how little time it took.
The secret to my couch potato success was to invest in good running gear and to follow a training regime (note: this book is by the same author and mine seemed to cater for a more diverse number of styles) specifically designed for someone of my fitness to get up to speed.
The regime essentially consists of running three days a week with fairly easy runs on Tuesday and Thursday followed by a more challenging one on Sunday. It starts you off easy and gradually builds you up in waves in order to give your muscles time to repair in between runs.
So, if you are a bit of a couch potato like me, I fully recommend signing up for an event like this as it gives you the motivation to get off your arse on a regular basis. And get yourself a good training regime as well as some good running gear! It is well worth it.
[edit: also, if you are a chap, I recommend tape on your nipples for runs over one hour.]
These are fairly old but I only just stumbled upon them. Some good insights from David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Richard Leakey and Jane Goodall on the environment and the future of our planet.
