In which I discuss science’s identity crisis

I disagree with the book. That’s not the problem. I can’t think of a single logical reason as to why I disagree with the book. That’s the problem.  Hopefully, by the end of this post, I’ll have solved the problem.

The book is called The End of Science and it is by a man named John Horgan. It details, as you might expect, ‘The Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age’ and is therefore a demonstration of his fairly dire premonition of the future of science.

The book is essentially formatted as a series of interviews of famous scientists and philosophers of science in order to make a broader point about the horizons of science. I’m not going to rehash what these people have said because a) it isn’t my intention to make their point for them and b) I’m nowhere near as eminently qualified to do so as other, easily accessible sources. This post will attempt to simultaneously synthesise and address my thoughts on this book as well as try to demonstrate to you my larger (and truth be told, fairly limited) opinion on where science is going to go.

The irony of Meyrin

From the lofty heights of a plane window, Switzerland looks like a third grade art project gone disastrously wrong.

A patchwork of yellow, green and all the shades in between dominates the landscape, rising and falling gently, almost as though god wasn’t quite bothered to fully stretch the terrain out. Patches of forest punctuate the unordered grid, felt stuck on haphazardly with little regard for any aesthetic function it might actually provide (or in this case, detract from). Rivers and lakes flow sinuously into each other, ensuring that they are placed as inconveniently as possible so as to ensure that no settlement can increase beyond a particular size. The glitter of human habitation is scattered sporadically around the scene as well, and the occasionally, the glint of the sun of a car’s windshield or the glass roof of a house is bright enough to blind me, 40000 feet in the air.

At some point, with no discernible transition, the ground gives way to the clouds, and I am so high up it seems as though the clouds are simply resting ethereally upon the ground. From the clouds rise the stubborn peaks of the alps, the snow-covered crown of Mont Blanc pondering its kingdom imperiously.

The border of the plane window casually frames this mess of a scene, and yet somehow, it works. All of the disparate elements combine to form a cohesive image, one that actually makes sense. You’re so high up that while you can’t actually see any humans, you can see the fruits of their effort and this lends a certain organic feel to what you see. It tells the tale of a people that seeks to control its land, but not to rule over it. It tells the tale of a peaceful coexistence between nature and man, one that benefits both and harms neither.  It tells the tale of a Switzerland that you want to experience a lifetime’s worth of in mere weeks.

This is not that tale.

Fun Science

You’ve probably heard of Graphene. If not, it’s basically a sheet of Carbon one atom thick which, well, does everything you can think of  and more. Here’s just a few of the things it does:

• It allows incredibly fast data transfer speeds, almost 1 terabit/second
• It may be able to be used in phone batteries which charge in 5 seconds.
• It can clump together radioactive waste, facilitating its disposal much more efficiently.
• It can be used to make filters so that sea water from literally anywhere is drinkable.
• It can be used to create touchscreens which are incredibly thin and never break
• A single sheet of graphene can produce headphones that are as high quality as a pair of sennheisers
• It could be used to create bionic conductors which can reconnect neurons and so people with spinal injuries will be able to use their limbs again
• It can repair itself itself when broken.
• It can form a gel, aerographene, which is less dense than air

And that’s just a small taster of its many uses.

What fascinates me, however, isn’t just the fact that one material can do so many things. What fascinates me is the way that it was discovered. What basically happened was that two physicists used  a piece of tape to peel away individual layers of graphene from a piece of graphite. They were, essentially, just messing around and this resulted in the discovery of a revolutionary material. And it’s not even the first time this happened. A few years ago, they also managed to successfully levitate a frog. It actually looks really funny:

When I was a kid, I had this image of being a scientist that was, well, less than exciting. I thought it was all about carefully planned experiments based on long, well-defined processes and studies. But things like this show that there is room to just mess around and have a bit of fun. I actually really enjoy that sort of thing, just coming up with a crazy idea and going with it.

There’s just something very satisfying in knowing that even if you just do something that’s completely out of the blue, there’s a chance in succeeding and making something that’s really wonderful.

Hello Again

Hello there!

Remember me?

As you may have gathered, I haven’t posted for a while. That’s primarily because for the last five weeks, I’ve been preparing for and then actually doing a bunch of exams. Which is always fun.

But I digress. You may have heard about this already, but a team of astronomers has discovered a group of 73 quasars. And while that’s pretty cool, the most amazing thing is that it is 4 billion lightyears across.

Read that again.

4 billion lightyears.

That’s slightly less than 1/20th of the diameter of the universe. Current astrophysical models and theories suggest that no structure can exceed a diameter of 1.2 billion lightyears. And this one does it in spectacular fashion.

Here’s a representation of the cluster:

To give you an idea of how unimaginably vast this cluster is, our milky way wouldn’t even make up one pixel of this cluster.

When I look up in the sky, I’m awestruck by the unimaginable vastness of the universe. Just looking at it now, it’s impossible to imagine that the sky isn’t infinite and has a limit.

So it’s weird, but the discovery of this cluster has two main effects on me. Yes, it does make me feel tiny and insignificant, but what self-respecting universal body doesn’t? But more interestingly, in some ways, it makes the universe seem smaller.

I know, it sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. See, before I read about this structure, the universe was, to all intents and purposes, infinite. There was no way to put a limit on its size, nor could anything hold a candle to it in terms of size. But now, I know that there’s this massive thing that’s actually comparable on a scale to the universe, so it seems as though a limit has been put on the size of the universe. Sure, it’s not a small limit by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not infinity.

I’m not actually sure how to feel about this realization. If I had to put it into words, I’d say that it feels like I’m finally realizing that a childhood dream isn’t true. It’s not an altogether unpleasant feeling, because it’s not like I’m disappointed the universe isn’t infinite, but it does awake a weird conflict in me.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I’ll try and post a little more often from now on.

Later.

Quantum thoughts

So a couple of days ago, I went to this physics talk by Miles Padgett, a professor of physics at Glasgow University. The talk was called ‘Does god play dice with Angles’ and was basically about Quantum Physics and how we know that the laws of Quantum Physics supersede those of deterministic nature (basically that everything has a cause and there’s been a logical sequence of events since the big bang. Therefore, if you have all the variables, you can predict anything).

He started off by talking about some pretty basic(ish) stuff. Wave particle duality, the double slit experiment and the collapsing wave function and stuff. I’ve talked about this before on the blog, so I won’t go into much detail, but it’s still pretty interesting to think about how counter-intuitive these ideas seem at first, but if you look at the evidence, how much sense they actually make.

He then went on to talk about quantum entanglement. Basically, the principle is that it is possible to get two particles (like photons) and somehow link  the two, so that if, for example, one of the photons started spinning upwards, the other would spin downwards. This makes it possible to make a measurement of just one of the particles and know what the same property would be like on the other particle, even if you haven’t observed it at all. This makes for some very interesting ramifications.  He showed us at one point the image of a skull that had been formed by passing photons through a stencil of some sort. The image was formed on a screen. He then showed us the image formed on a screen which another proton stream had gone to, and miraculously, an image of a scull was formed on that screen as well. So what’s interesting about that? Well, it leads to faster-than-light information.
Think of it this way. Imagine that there are two screens which are two light years apart. And while you’re at it, imagine that you’ve somehow managed to get two streams of photons which are perfectly entangled. So you have an emitter in the middle, and so one light year away from each screen. The  emitter emits these two photon streams, and for one of them, there’s this stencil of a skull, and so the image of a skull is formed on the sheet.  Now, if  we accept that the two photon streams are perfectly entangled, the image of a skull will be formed on the other screen as well. And if you have an observer staring at the screen with stenciled image of the skull, as soon as they see the image of the skull, they know there will be a scull on the other screen as well. So the knowledge that there’s a scull on the other screen is with you instantly. 

So what does this mean? It means that this information travels the two light years from one screen to the other instantly. So it seems like the information has travelled faster than the speed of light, right? But this doesn’t mean that we’ve had faster than light communication, simply because no  message has actually travelled from one screen to the other, just an assumption.

This was a really interesting talk, and it brought up a lot of questions, most of which give a lot of food for thought. Quantum physics is more and more interesting the more you know.

Curiosity (Not the personality trait…)

I’ve recently read this article about the Curiosity Mars Rover, and I was actually pretty interested to see how much time it would take just to move the rover  a short distance. I completely understand the intentions, though. Every so often, the Rover’s going to stop and analyze the environment around it to see if it can spot anything. This means that it will take almost a year to reach this place called Mount Sharp on Mars, which is only about 8 kilometres away. Apparently, each time the Rover stops and analyses its surroundings, it’ll take about a couple of weeks to do so.

It’s absolutely incredible to think of the scale of an operation like this. At its closest, Mars is about 56 million kilometres away, so it’s actually amazing to think that we got there in only 8 months (That’s, at it’s slowest, almost 10000 km per hour). The fact that everything was still in order after 8 months in the most hostile environment imaginable is testament to the skill of the engineers.

I was really interested to see the method with which Curiosity landed. It was a rather long and involved process, but this video explains it really well:

I can’t imagine the thought process that would go into someone coming up with that particular way of landing, but it’s very, very clever.

So obviously, there have been rovers on Mars before, Spirit and Opportunity being the most famous of these. But as amazing as Rovers are, it would be even more amazing to get a man on Mars. And one of Curiosity’s missions is to find the amount of radiation on the planet Mars to see whether humans on Mars is possible. I certainly hope so. The day we land a man on another planet will certainly be one of the most important days in human history.

By the way, if you want to see a panorama of the Martian landscape, click here

Gorilla Glass

So yesterday, for reasons unknown to anyone, my galaxy nexus screen cracked. It was just in my bag and when I took it out, there was a spiderweb of cracks on the screen. Something must have probably cracked.

As you may imagine, I was quite distressed and almost immediately went onto the web and started researching whether or not the screen was replaceable/ repairable. Something that quite a few people were irritated about was the Galaxy Nexus’s lack of Gorilla Glass on its screen.

I had heard of gorilla glass before, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, so I decided to find out. Basically, Gorilla Glass is a special type glass that’s primarily used for things like computers, tablets, smartphones, and other electronic devices. What’s so special about this particular type of glass (apart from the name) is that it’s very light and very resistant to impact and scratches.

Naturally, I wanted to know how exactly it was that instead of normal glass, Corning managed to manufacture superglass instead. It turns out that the prcoess is actually quite an involved one. Corning takes silicon dioxide (or sand) and then combines it with Aluminum as well as Sodium ions. This molten glass is then poured into a trough which is V-Shaped. It keeps pouring, and once the glass is overflowing, robotic arms begin to pull sheets of glass out of the edge of the trough. These sheets are about half a millimeter thick, and aren’t very strong just yet. Corning makes them strong by dipping them into a bath of potassium ions, at about 400 degrees celsius. The purpose of this is basically to replace the sodium ions in the glass sheets they made before with potassium ions. The intense heat is enough to break the bonds of the sodium ions, but not the potassium ions. This means that the glass emerges, compressed by potassium ions. This compression is what provides the protective layer.

There’s another benefit to gorilla glass apart from its incredible strength. It’s also very thin, and this means that if you incorporate it into your device, it’ll be a bit thinner, which is always nice. Apart from just mobile devices, numerous TV manufacturers are also looking into making their TVs more durable with Gorilla Glass.

I know that the iPhone uses Gorilla Glass, but I’ve always taken the touchscreen of the iPhone for granted until I found out about how complex a procedure it is to make the glass. Yes, I know the iPhone is nearly indestructible, but now that I’ve had a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at it, it’s a lot more jaw dropping.

No emotion…

I was just pondering matters of a random nature a few days ago, and I thought of something interesting.

You know how when you touch the top of an oven stove when it’s on, it hurts, right? Now just think…how many times did you actually have to touch that oven stove to realize that you shouldn’t do that. Your answer is hopefully one.

Now oven stoves aside, here’s my idea. It seems like it would fit more in a science fiction novel than in real life, but it’s cool nonetheless. Basically, every time you experience an emotion, it causes a spike in some chemical in the brain (I’m not too concerned about the actual neurobiology). Now, all this spike is is something your body does, right?

So now, let’s imagine that every time this spike occurs in your brain, it’s detected and you get an electric shock. Not a large one, mind you, just large enough to sting a bit and irritate you. But subconsciously, I think it might be doing a bit more than that. You would start to subconsciously assume that feeling that particular emotion would lead to you getting the electric shock. Now since you assumed this and naturally, you wouldn’t want to be shocked, your body would start to suppress this emotion. Basically, you wouldn’t feel that emotion.

Now I haven’t done any research for this, so I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work at all, but it’s interesting to imagine someone who has no feelings whatsoever. How would they think? How would they respond to stimuli like pain? How would they even perceive the world? It really makes you realize how much we rely on emotion.

The point is, it would be a cool idea for a comic book.

The End 🙂

Fractals

You should watch this video

If you didn’t watch it, it’s all about these things called fractals. Fractals are essentially these systems whose complexity doesn’t reduce if you zoom into them. Basically, you can stand with the thing in front of your nose , and then stand 30 feet away, and it would look no more complex.

These are used extensively in things like computer generated animation. What happens is that the images are then broken up into incredibly small triangles, which can then be manipulated to make ordinary polygons seem a lot more organic. That’s how incredibly detailed scenes such as those in the movies Up and Toy Story  are created. When this technique was first made, it took about 15 minutes to render each  on a computer that was hundreds of times less powerful than my phone.

In fact, that’s basically what all the animation studios do with software like Renderman (that’s an animation software) do. Yes, they have literally thousands of other features as well, but at their very core, that’s how they work.

But to me, it’s more interesting to see how fractals occur naturally in our world. Instead of blabbering on endlessly about how they occur, I’m just going to tell you to go to this website. It’s pretty amazing.

It’s awesome to see how these incredibly complex systems can be found every where you look. It’s really made me look at things as simple as clouds in a whole new way.

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Woah…

Picture got from http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2011/08/weekend_diversion_aim_for_the/pillars-of-creation.jpeg

This thing. Is beautiful. Like seriously.

Okay, so for those of you who don’t know, these are the pillars of creation. They’re part of the eagle nebula, a massive cloud in the universe that makes stars. See those red dots in the image? Those are stars. Yes. The eagle nebula is that big.

Now, apart from the fact that the picture is absolutely astoundingly beautiful, what’s really amazing about this is that this is literally the birthplace of planets, stars and just about anything else in the universe. Like we were once part of something like this.

So yes. When I first saw this, I was AMAZED. Hope you are too 😀

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