ideofact

Comforting

I've been reading The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone. I vaguely remember studying the subject in high school physics--the thing I remember most is that while I had all kinds of problems with classical physics (I think some of the math threw me), I really enjoyed the few weeks (was it even two?) we spent discussing quantum mechanics.

I find this passage particularly moving:

Left alone, the neutron lives, on average, a whole fifteen minutes before it vanishes in a puff of three other particles. Fortunately again for us humans, the neutron is stabilized within atomic nuclei, so certain combinations of up to 209 protons and neutrons can bundle together and live forever. This means our world is made of scores of different elements, and not just the single element hydrogen. And it's all because mass is energy and energy is mass.

We are in the realm of Lucretius.

For some time, I have been troubled by the notion of entropy: why is it we live in a highly sophisticated, structured world when the rules of classical physics suggest that we should trend toward a simpler state. (Julian Barbour raises this problem in The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Perhaps I'm just too dense to understand his argument, but it did not seem to me that he resolved the problem.) Quantum mechanics suggests that at the subatomic level, there are pathways to both simplicity and complexity, as well as discoverable reasons for the tendency towards the latter.

In Praise of Lindsay Lohan...

...or at least the popular press' infatuation with her. (Full disclosure: I don't know too much about Ms. Lohan, but the two movies I have seen her in, both on basic cable -- Mean Girls and Freaky Friday -- I was pleasantly surprised at how much verve she had.)

I mention this because of Steven King's interview, in which he says,

You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. ...

By all means, read the whole interview (we helped Pakistan develop nuclear arms? How? By not cracking down on BCCI quickly enough??). Still, I have a theory of why Lindsay and Britney (I don't and never have liked her at all) preoccupy us. Stories about their antics get the public's attention because they're easy to frame as basic right/wrong issues (Lindsay Lohan is a drunk, Paris Hilton is a slut, Britney is a terrible mom, etc; also--Barry Bonds is a drug abuser, Michael Vick is dog-abusing monster). When the media report on, say, a thug like Chavez (who deserves a Lohan-esque "call the slut a slut" approach), they lose the public. Because so much coverage needlessly avoids calling a spade a spade in the name of "balance," stories that don't shy away from negative portrayals of bad actors draw readers (and viewers, of course). The public eats up stories that can draw clear moral distinctions and say, "Here's the bad guy." It doesn't seem to matter (Duke Lacrosse, Bonds, Lohan, even Paris Hilton) whether the bad guy is really a bad guy or not.

Obviously, such lack of seriousness has costs. If our present media culture existed in the 1930s and 1940s, it would denigrate the brave and lovely Josephine Baker as a slut while refusing to call Hitler a fascist.

No peaking

I couldn't help but think of Actaeon glimpsing Diana in her bath when I read this story in which some argue that astronomers glimpsing the secrets of the universe may very well have cursed, not just them, but all of us:

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.

Which is why, as Woody Allen once wrote, "if the girl in the office down the hall has some good points but perhaps not all the qualities you desire it's best to compromise."

I've been reading about quantum mechanics recently, and must admit that just as I am a classical liberal who questions whether my prejudices make the most sense, I am also a classicist when it comes to physics (the difference being that classical liberalism can prevail through arms--whether at Thermopylae, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach or Kabul: subatomic particles are indifferent to the fortunes of war). The notion that a single particle can be in two different places at the same instant is unsettling, to say the least (I'm reminded of a scene in David Lynch's Lost Highway, in which a very creepy Robert Blake is both at a party speaking with a guest and in the guest's home at exactly the same moment). In any case, I've yet to encounter this bit of Heisenberg gone wild:

quantum theory says that whenever we observe or measure something, we could stop it decaying due what is what is called the "quantum Zeno effect," which suggests that if an "observer" makes repeated, quick observations of a microscopic object undergoing change, the object can stop changing - just as a watched kettle never boils.

In this case however, it turns out that quantum mechanics implies that if an unstable system has survived for far longer than the average such system should, then the probability that it will continue to survive decreases more slowly than it otherwise would. By resetting the clock, the survival probability would now once again fall exponentially.

"The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."

Worse still, astronomers with their universe-guzzling Hubble telescopes might have done more damage:

This is not the only damage to the heavens that astronomers may have caused. Our cosmos is now significantly lighter than scientists had thought after an analysis of the amount of light given out by galaxies concluded that some shone from lightweight electrons, not heavyweight atoms. In all, the new analysis suggests that the universe has lost about one fifth of its overall mass.

I suspect socks lost in the laundry account for most of that mass...

It's easy to make jokes (perhaps preferable), but I'm reminded of a line from Borges: We don't know what the universe is. Like a child playing with an adult machine, we might well push some button, or undo some safety catch, that leads to disaster. That said, I'm with the child -- let's keep on peaking...