We Americans are willing to expose our bodies to great harm
in search of euphoric, transcendent experiences. We'll try
anything from hard drugs to extreme sports, reckless driving
to autoerotic asphyxiation, just to break out of the unbearable
mundanity of being ourselves. A lot of our pleasures and pursuits
are escapist, whether you're escaping to the world of Disney
or the World of Warcraft. I sense a feeling out there of being
trapped, of desperate boredom and sensory understimulation.
Here we are now, entertain us! But with what?
Most people don't file physics or astronomy or evolutionary
biology in the 'fun' category. These subjects are presented
to us in school as dry and tedious for the most part. The
non-geeks naturally lose interest, and the geeks' pleasure
quickly gets ground down under the pressures of grades, jobs,
corporate and academic politics and the like. This is a shame.
In missing out on science, most of us miss out on a rich source
of internal adventure, one without the kinds of health risks
associated with skydiving and glue-sniffing. Science was my
favorite subject in elementary school, aside from art. One
of the biggest pleasures of my adult life is that when practiced
properly, art and science are actually exactly the same thing.
The last line translates into American as "'Cause there's
jack squat down here on Earth", and it's where I philosophically
part company with Eric Idle. It's true that modern science
has been hard at work these past hundred years making the
familiar strange, and the strange familiar. The appalling
simultaneous hugeness and tinyness of the world, and ourselves,
can be vertigo-inducing. But lots of genuine pleasures make
you dizzy: love, ecstatic religious experiences, Imax movies,
Monk and Coltrane.
I was a textbook prep-school hippie as a teenager. By my
senior year in high school, I had long hair with beads in
it, tie-dyes and army pants and a growing
collection of Dead tapes. While I'm too chicken to have
ever tried LSD, I've been extremely interested in the artists
inspired by it: Jerry Garcia, Stanley
Mouse, R Crumb, Pink Floyd,
the Beatles, the guys who wrote Hair,
Matt Groening, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Miles
Davis, . I've read some Eastern philosophy, a lot of earnest
new-agey misreadings of Eastern philosophy, and way too much
stoner poetry. So far, nothing I've encountered is remotely
as weird or mind-altering as what the dweeby guys in the lab
coats are trying, in their uncharismatic way, to tell us.
So here's my collection of the trippiest items I've picked
up from contemporary physics and biology. Pull up the bong
and enjoy.
Time is much weirder
than it seems
Everybody knows what time is. Right? Or do we? When I started
looking into what this Einstein guy is all about, the most
startling thing I discovered was his conception of time. Here's
a summary from Brian
Greene's book The Fabric Of The Cosmos, emphases his:
Just as we envision all of space as really being
out there, as really existing, we should also envision
all of time as really being out there, as really
existing too. Past, present and future certainly appear
to be distinct entities. But as Einstein once said, "For
we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present
and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
One way to read Einstein's theory of relativity is to think
of time as a movie. You're like a character in a 3D movie,
with each frame of film standing for a moment of time. The
rest of the movie is out there; you just can't see any of
it outside of the frame you're on.
Some of the laws of physics are time-reversible. For example,
the orbit of the moon around the earth would work exactly
the same way backwards as it does forwards. More complex thermodynamic
systems, like you and me, usually aren't time-reversible.
Imagine one of those drinking-bird desk toys. It's designed
to minimize friction and to give the illusion of perpetual
motion. But the bird can't bob up and down forever. If you
were to leave it alone for a hundred or a thousand or a million
years, it would almost certainly wind up lying on the floor
after falling over into one of arbitrarily many positions.
The physicists call this the law of increasing entropy: physical
processes always move from less-probable 'ordered' configurations
into more-probable'chaotic' configurations. Most of the phenomena
we encounter in our lives, from our metabolisms to our household
appliances, have as their underlying mechanism the conversion
and dissipation of ordered energy into disordered heat.
A system's fixed initial state has relatively low entropy
because the coordinates of the system's molecules are constrained.
As the system evolves and the molecules dissipate, their coordinates
can move into larger volumes of space, both real and mathematical.
You can think of the Big Bang
as our universe's fixed initial state. For some known reason,
we know not why, the universe at the instant of the BB was
highly symmetrical and orderly, in a state of extreme thermodynamic
disequilibrium. Since then, entropy has been steadily increasing
throughout space. Physicists think that time has an arrow
because the entropy of any given system is steadily increasing;
we perceive the increase of entropy as time 'passing'. If,
as trends suggest, everything settles into a state of total
equilibrium or 'heat death' in about a hundred billion years,
time as we know it will presumably coast to a gentle halt.
Is this time-asymmetric dissipation of ordered energy into
disordered heat fundamental, or is it possible to reverse
it? There's a thought experiment a much-invoked by scientists,
first described by James Clerk Maxwell. Imagine a microscopic
being, the so-called 'demon', guarding a gate between two
halves of a room. As the molecules in the air bounce around
at random, the little demon only lets slow molecules into
one half, and only fast ones into the other. Eventually, this
makes one side of the room cooler than before and the other
hotter, increasing the room's orderliness. In order for Maxwell's
demon to do this task, though, it has to convert ordered energy
to heat. When you take the room and the demon together, their
total entropy does increase; the demon always has to generate
more entropy than it removes as it organizes the air molecules.
A
math professor named David Harrison has suggested that the
law of increasing entropy is a consequence of the universe's
expansion. If the universe were contracting, the logic goes,
entropy would decrease and time would be reversed.
It's not very likely that all of a sudden there would be
this titanic explosion of ordered, symmetrical energy at every
point in space. Why is the universe here at all? Why, as the
physicists say, is there something rather than nothing? One
school of thought says, well, improbable though it might be,
it only had to happen once. Another says that it actually
happens quite often, just not where we can easily see it.
Lee Smolin
thinks a new universe gets started every time a black hole
forms. The titanic pressure and energy at the black hole's
center might rip a hole in our spacetime, causing a new hugely
compressed superhot region of the universe to explode in its
own big bang. By extension, our own universe would have gotten
started by the collapse of some colossal star in another universe
fourteen billion years ago. Some physicists have suggested
the idea of a white hole, a mathematically modeled time
reversal of a black hole. You can think of the event horizon
of a black hole as a surface moving outward at the local speed
of light, delicately balanced between escaping and falling
back in. The event horizon of a white hole is a surface moving
inward at the local speed of light, delicately balanced between
being swept outward and succeeding in reaching the center.
The horizon of a white hole is like the horizon of a black
hole turned inside out.
One last thing about time. It turns out that if you time-reverse
matter, you get antimatter. In 1932, soon after the prediction
of positrons (antimatter twins of electrons) by Paul Dirac,
Carl Anderson found that cosmic-ray collisions produced these
particles in a cloud chamber, a container of gas through which
moving charged particles leave detectable trails. The electric
charge-to-mass ratio of a particle can be measured by observing
the curling of its cloud-chamber track in a magnetic field.
At first, positrons were mistaken for electrons traveling
in the opposite direction. Since then, the antiparticles of
many other subatomic particles have been created in particle
accelerator experiments. In recent years, complete atoms of
antimatter have been assembled out of antiprotons and positrons,
collected in electromagnetic traps. Can it be that a sufficiently
large wallop of energy knocks a particle's movement backwards
in time?
Relativistic quantum mechanics predicts the existence of
antiparticles for every kind of matter particle, which so
far experiments have confirmed. Given all the symmetry here,
it's puzzling that the universe doesn't have equal amounts
of matter and antimatter. If there are any significant concentrations
of antimatter in the observable universe, we don't know about
them. When matter and antimatter collide, they mutually annihilate
and turn into energy. Observational results suggest that in
the first microseconds after the Big Bang, for every ten billion
pairs of particle and antiparticle, there was one extra particle
left over without an antiparticle to annihilate it into background
radiation. If there hadn't been any disparity between the
amount of matter and antimatter in the the early universe,
there might well not be any matter at all, thus no stars and
planets, thus no people.
It's not possible to directly represent higher-dimensional
objects and spaces, except mathematically. However, we can
get an idea by projecting them onto our space, the way a 3D
object casts a 2D shadows on the floor. Escher drawings and
other visual paradoxes can become quite sensible if you imagine
them to have an additional degree of freedom in which to move.
Here's an image by a math professor named Thomas
Banchoff. As far as I can tell, this is a projection of
a four-dimensional torus (donut) with the colorful bands analagous
to the latitude and longitude lines on a sphere.
Lisa Randall says in her book that the molecules in a frying
pan's nonstick coating form patterns that make the most sense
as higher-dimensional structures 'flattened' into 3-space.
The 'flattened' patterns don't repeat, so highly regular organic
food molecules can't dock with them and stick.
The universe itself may turn out to have some symmetries
at the very widest size scales conceivable. At the largest
scales of the visible universe, where we're talking about
clusters of galaxies, matter is gathered into filaments and
walls surrounding appallingly huge voids. My friend Donald
Goldsmith compares it to a loofa sponge. Dig
the Millenium Project's computer simulations of the entire
universe to see what he means. The image below shows a
diffuse cloud of gas, a representative section of the early
universe, as it collapses on itself due to gravity:
The 'filaments and voids' arrangement of the galaxies suggests
a foam to me. Also thought to resemble a foam: the vacuum,
'empty' space, when seen at the very tiniest scales. Quantum
foam, also referred to as spacetime foam, is a concept first
devised by John Wheeler. At the smallest scales our theories
can describe, the uncertainty principle predicts that particles
and energy briefly flick into existence and then mutually
annihilate back into the vacuum. As the scale of time and
space shrinks, the energy of these so-called virtual particles
increases. According to Einstein's
theory of relativity, energy curves spacetime the way you
curve a hammock when you sit in it. At sufficiently small
scales, the energy of the vacuum's fluctuations become large
enough to give spacetime a frothing, turbulent character.
The vacuum resembles the ocean in this regard. When you see
them from orbit, oceans appear perfectly smooth, but in a
rowboat they reveal themselves to be seething with chaotic
energy.
Metastability is a physics term describing a system poised
in a fragile, temporary equilibrium between two stable states.
Metastable systems often demonstrate scale-invariance. Animal
brains are metastable systems, and some astrophysicists think
that galaxies are too. Here's a resemblance observed separately
by the New
York Times and McSweeney's:
Mark Miller at Brandeis
created the image on the left. As he says, rodent brains are
gorgeous at the right magnification. On the right is the Millenium
Simulation. Here's the McSweeney's version:
Another place to find scale-invariance is in fractals, graphs
of simple-seeming recursive mathematical equations performed
over and over. When you have an equation that takes its own
output as an input, you get these feedback loops that look,
when graphed, like the shape of a great many things in nature,
from seashells to coastlines.
Many biological processes display a fractal nature when
examined temporally, for example, human heart rate. There
is interesting speculation (Goldberger et al) as to why
such fractal dynamics might arise: "A defining feature
of healthy function is adaptability, the capacity to respond
to unpredictable stimuli and stresses. Fractal physiology
is exemplified by long-range correlations in the human heartbeat.
Long-range correlations are a self-organizing mechanism
for highly complex processes that generate fluctuations
across a wide range of time scales. The lack of a characteristic
scale inhibits the emergence of highly periodic behaviors
(mode-locking), which would greatly narrow functional responsiveness.
This latter conjecture is supported by findings from life-threatening
conditions such as heart failure, where the breakdown of
fractal correlations is often accompanied by the emergence
of a dominant mode. Transitions to strongly periodic dynamics
are observed in many other pathologies, including Parkinson's
disease (tremor), obstructive sleep apnea, sudden cardiac
death, epilepsy, and fetal distress syndromes. The paradoxical
appearance of highly ordered dynamics with pathologic states
(often termed "disorders") exemplifies the concept
of complexity loss in disease and aging."
You can think of life as the complex eddies in the stream
of energy that the Sun radiates into space via the Earth.
You have access to a very great deal of animal consciousness.
The difference between your brain and a chimpanzee's is that
the outermost layers of yours are thicker and more complicated.
Underneath the cerebral cortex, the bulk of your central nervous
system is a very great deal like that of all other primates.
The deeper into the center of the brain you go, the more you
have anatomically in common with all of our mammal forebears,
and from there back to the therapsids and synapsids
and vast swaths
of amniotes generally. We tend to project anthropomorphic
consciousness onto everything, but we also have a tendency
to ignore the huge majority of our own behavior that is not
'human', by which I mean automatic, reflexive, nonconscious.
I don't mean unconscious, like when you're asleep. I mean
what's happening when you're wide awake and active - your
motor skills, your metabolism, your emotions, your senses.
An excerpt from the late Carl Sagan's highly-recommended
book The
Dragons Of Eden:
We are descended from reptiles and mammals both...If we
we gave full rein to the reptilian aspects of our nature,
we would clearly have a low survival potential. Because
the [reptilian brain systems are] woven so intimately into
the fabric of the brain, its functions cannot be entirely
avoided for long. Perhaps the dream state permits, in our
fantasy and its reality, the [reptile brain] to function
regularly, as if it were still in control.
If this is true, I wonder, after Aeschylus, if the waking
state of other mammals is very much like the dream state
of humans - where we can recognize signs, such as the feeling
of running water and the smell of honeysuckle, but have
an extremely limited repertoire of symbols such as words;
where we encounter vivid sensory and emotional images and
active intuitive understanding, but very little rational
analysis; where we are unable to perform tasks requiring
extensive concentration; where we experience short attention
spans and frequent distractions and, most of all, a very
feeble sense of individuality or self, which gives way to
a pervading fatalism, a sense of unpredictable buffeting
by uncontrollable events. If this is where we have come
from, we have come very far.
Other animals may not have semantic language or third-party
consciousness, but they do have memes. Waxwings
have a courting ritual where they pass a berry back and forth.
Two waxwings will sit on a branch next to one another. One
passes the berry to the other, who takes one hop away, turns
around on the branch, hops back and returns the berry. More
rarely, a flock of waxwings sitting on a telephone wire or
fence will pass a berry along the entire row until one random
bird decides to eat it. This behavior is learned and spread
by imitation. Susan
Blackmore discusses the pecking open of milk-bottle tops
as another example of a bird meme.
Contemporary physics says that you and I aren't so much 'things'
as patterns of matter and energy held together over time.
Tor
Nørretranders describes a person, with beautiful
concision, as
a whirl in the world, a pattern in a stream of matter.
The smallest things we know of are extremely weird, and as
we're able to see smaller and smaller things, they're getting
weirder and weirder. Aside from the hydrogen, every atom in
your body contains neutrons. Here are some fun facts about
neutrons from wikipedia. Don't get too bogged down in all
the Greek; the point is to get a sense of how freely your
body's tiniest constituents can transform into various other
forms of matter and energy.
Outside the nucleus, free neutrons are unstable and have
a mean lifetime of about fifteen minutes, decaying by emitting
an electron and antineutrino to become a proton. This decay
mode, known as beta decay, can also occur within certain
unstable nuclei. Protons can also transform into neutrons
through the process of electron capture, sometimes called
inverse beta decay. Particles inside the nucleus are typically
resonances between neutrons and protons, which transform
into one another by the emission and absorption of force
particles.
If neutrons and matter's other tiny basic constituents were
"things" made of "stuff" then this description
would be totally nonsensical. But if we think of subatomic
particles as vibrations of energy fields, their behavior begins
to make more sense, and becomes intelligible through mathematical
modeling. The vibrating energy fields that make up particles
behave very much like water waves, guitar strings, speaker
cones and many other familiar human-scale phenomena. Dig
this fun wave simulator to get a feel for how scientists imagine
that particles actually work. Here are some screenshots
I took of a modeled O2 molecule doing its thing.
The first one shows it in its lowest energy state, and the
others are more excited.
Your tiniest components' wavelike mathematical properties
are well-established, but interpreting the equations into
English is an ongoing challenge. If the
quarks and gluons making up protons and neutrons are vibrations,
then the question is, vibrations
of what? Waves of what? Theorists can only make wild-eyed
but intriguing conjectures. In the meantime, stay tuned for
the Large
Hadron Collider.
