The Conscious Universe

What's the point?

2009-02-20T19:54:00.000-08:00

Life on Earth evolved from simple organisms, to the stage where the brain – the most complex organ of all – has been developed. The human brain may well be the most complex structure in the universe, but is it an inevitable by-product of biological evolution? Given that life can start on a planet, is there a biological "ladder of progress" inevitably and inexorably leading to the development of intelligence, cognition and consciousness, and thus technological civilizations?
Darwinism and natural selection tell us that nature does not plan ahead; mutations occur randomly and are selected for their survival value at that particular time. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins likens nature to a blind watchmaker; blind because it does not see ahead, and has no pre-defined purpose in view. Dawkins writes: "... Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning." So, according to this line of reasoning, humanity’s existence is a result of mere chance.

Some biologists and philosophers look to the concept of convergent evolution – i.e. different evolutionary paths leading to the same features, e.g. eyes, legs, wing – to show that the result of evolution is not pure chance … that there must be a purpose to life. Convergent evolution is hardly surprising when one considers that millions of species on Earth are exposed to the same selective conditions – so similar solutions emerge time and time again. However, as Jared Diamond points out in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, some traits do not evolve convergently – i.e. convergent evolution is not universal. Diamond takes the example of woodpeckers that are able to excavate into live wood for food or nest sites, and appear to be the only species that has evolved to do this. No other species – e.g. parrots, honeyeaters, possums – can excavate live wood. And just as woodpeckers are the only species to have exploited a particular niche, only one species in the billions that have ever existed in the 4.6 billion year history of the Earth has ever developed human intelligence and consciousness. He goes on to say: "Earth’s really successful species have instead been dumb and clumsy rats and beetles, who found better routes to their current dominance".
So the neo-Darwinists tell us that the evolution of intelligence is not an inevitable outcome of evolution, and it is very improbable.

Even great physicists have remarked on how the universe appears to have no point. Richard Feynman wrote: "The great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behaviour has a kind of meaninglessness about it".
And Steven Weinberg wrote: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless".

If the whole point of science is to try to understand the universe, and if the universe really is pointless, then why are we humans doing science? Why are we working so hard on things like astrophysics and cosmology? The problem is that we simply don’t know. In The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies states that he does not believe human intelligence to be an "accidental by-product of haphazard processes", but he is reluctant to resort to supernatural explanations. He says, "I do believe that life and mind are etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy half-glimpsed life principle." Somehow, the physical constants of the universe are set "just right" to allow intelligent beings to emerge. But how?
Science does not have all the answers, but this doesn’t mean that we should take refuge in mystic solutions. Scientists indeed try to find out more about the universe. Perhaps we will end up finding simple physical laws that explain the universe; or perhaps, just as there is the law of conservation of energy, there is also a law of "conservation of mystery" – i.e. the deeper we delve, the more mysteries we discover. However, we’ll never know unless we keep on investigating – trying to learn more – and we mustn’t pre-empt the conclusion by categorically saying, "the universe is pointless and intelligent life is just an accident", or take the deist solution and say "God set the physical constants of nature when she created the universe, and this made possible the eventual emergence of intelligent life".
For the moment, it appears to me that our lot is cast in a mysterious universe that has no purpose, but it may not be that way – that’s why we do science. And besides, isn’t it exciting to learn how nature works?

Hitler's Ethics

2009-02-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please - Mark Twain

I'm currently undertaking part-time studies toward an masters of science degree in astronomy at Swinburne University in Melbourne, so it is difficult for me to avoid knowing that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy - initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO. It commemorates the 400th anniversary of the invention of Galileo's telescope. Although Galileo removed our planet from the centre of the universe, one other great scientist - Charles Darwin - changed our view of what it means to be human. He showed that we are basically animals, and knocked man off his pedestal. This year also happens to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth - he was born on the 12th February 1809. To commemorate the occasion, there have been a lot of celebrations, including some very interesting public lectures and exhibits here in Melbourne. What did Darwin do that was so great? As we look around our planet, we notice that lifeforms - be they humans, ducks, giraffes, etc. - are ideally suited to their habitats. We also notice that bodily organs, such as eyes, ears, brains, are ideally suited to the function they perform. We thus get the impression of deliberate design - as though a supernatural creator designed life on Earth. Darwin answered the question of how such complex "design" could arise. The answer was cumulative evolution by natural selection - i.e. by non-random survival of random hereditary modifications/mutations. In a species whose members are not identical, those members that have characteristics that make them best adapted to their environments (fittest) are most likely to procreate and pass on their inherited characteristics. This theory of evolution by natural selection made redundant the concept of a creator God. However, the creationists have attempted to restore God to his pedestal by introducing the concept of "Intelligent Design".
Moreover, the creationists have tried to pass off Intelligent Design as a legitimate science that should be taught in schools alongside Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
Intelligent design is an alternative to the Genesis story of creation. All creation myths depend on the actions of some kind of all-powerful supernatural being, and Genesis (and Intelligent Design) is one of many creations myths. Intelligent design is a kind of guided evolution. According to the supporters of intelligent design, evolution does occur - obviously the evidence for evolution is impossible even for fundamentalist Christians to ignore - but this evolution is guided by the hand of an intelligent super-being, i.e. a God.

Evolution by cumulative natural selection effectively explains how organized complex lifeforms can arise out of primeval simplicity. It is the only scientific theory that is capable of explaining the emergence of complex life, and there is much scientific evidence to back it up. Intelligent design invokes an already existing intelligent deity - i.e. it postulates a complex being without offering any explanation for its origin. Intelligent design has no hope of ever being proven or disproven by scientific testing, so it is not science.

Unfortunately, Intelligent Design is not the only example of how science - and, in particular, Darwin's theory - have been misused to satisfy particular agendas. The distortion of Darwin's argument resulted in perhaps the darkest period in the history of the 20th century.
Adolf Hitler embraced Darwinism, and used it to formulate his own form of ethics. In Hitler's mind, the Darwinian struggle for existence, particularly the struggle between different races, became the sole basis for morality. In a 1923 speech, Hitler said the following:

"... Right alone is of no use to whomever does not have the power to impose his right. The strong have always triumphed. All of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant triumph of the strong over the weak ...". You might imagine him frothing at the mouth as he said this.

Hitler believed that the evolutionary progress and the struggle for existence was essential to promote progress. Here's what he had to say in Mein Kampf with regard to the notion of limiting population growth:

"... If reproduction is limited and the number of births decreased, then the natural struggle for existence, which only allows the strongest and healthiest to survive, will be replaced by the obvious desire to save at any cost even the weakest and sickest. Thereby a progeny is produced, which must become ever more miserable ... Eventually a stronger race will usurp the weaker ..."

So it is morally acceptable for the weak to be destroyed by the strong. This may give the impression of a barbaric, amoral dog-eat-dog view of the world, but Hitler also believed that ethics are purely a human construction - thus contradicting the Christian philosophy that ethics are God-given. He believed that morality and ethics are a product of evolution, and exist in only the "most highly evolved beings", humans. To Hitler, Germans (or Aryans) were the epitome of human morality - being more cultural and altruistic than any other race. In contrast, Jews were greedy, deceitful and immoral. He believed that strength and weakness not only applied to physical and mental attributes, but also to moral attributes. To Hitler, Jews were a morally inferior race of humans.

Using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Hitler was able to morally justify any action - including genocide and infanticide - if it contributed to the evolutionary improvement of the human race. Evolution and the biological improvement of the human species was the ultimate goal. The concept of human rights only encouraged weakness.

Obviously, Hitler's use of Darwinism was twisted and misguided. Hitler's concept of evolutionary improvement was influenced by his racial prejudices, and his personal opinion of what constitutes improvement. Just as the proponents of Intelligent Design tried to smuggle a creator God into evolutionary biology, Hitler tried to smuggle his own moral opinions and values.

Some people may blame science for Hitler's view of the world. They may blame science for the invention of weapons of mass destruction - after all, without Einstein's theory of relativity, the atomic bomb would never have been invented. But such people are misguided. Science makes no judgment about what is or isn't ethical; this is a matter for individuals and for society. Science, in its purest forms, seeks to learn more about the universe. However, science can (and should) provide advice and information as input to ethical discussions. Problems occur when our leaders allow their own prejudices and agendas to distort the facts. We saw this with Hitler; we saw this with George W. Bush who ignored advice he didn't like - e.g. AIDS-prevention initiatives and stem-cell research - because it went against his religious-based objections. Bush also ostracized scientists who argued that humans made a significant contribution to climate change. Hopefully the new tenant of the White House will treat science with the respect it deserves. Science should be allowed to advance, and should be used for the good of the planet; but this cannot happen if politicians and religious groups insist on distorting the facts.

Bushfires - the great leveller

2009-02-10T19:47:00.000-08:00

By now, most of the world has heard of the bushfires that are savaging the southern Australian state of Victoria. As I write this, 181 people are confirmed dead, a few thousand have been left homeless, and small towns have literally been destroyed. Not to mention the native wildlife that has been wiped out. The finger of blame is being pointed at firebugs but, although they may have worsened the situation, they did not cause it. Why do bushfires happen? Is there anything we can do to prevent them?
In the case of the Victorian bushfires, the 10-year drought and the unusually high temperatures have been big factors. One theory, as explained in the book "The Emerald Planet" by David Beerling, says that natural deforestation is occurring on Earth; forests are being destroyed by Mother Nature, and replaced by grassland. Here's how it works:

The death of trees in times of drought allows patches of grass and weeds to grow. These patches of grass provide a very flammable fuel in dry seasons; they are more flammable than the trees because of the way they process carbon dioxide. Bushfires, which arise due to the high-flammability of the grass, kill more trees, and allow more of these grasses to grow (these grasses recover very rapidly after burns). So, what we're seeing is grass usurping the dominance of forests by promoting fire. Nonflammable trees are gradually being replaced by highly-flammable grasslands, and this process is being aided by a gradual increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And just to top it off, it has been shown that smoke from burning forests acts to reduce rainfall by impeding cloud formation; the fires actually increase the severity of droughts - they cause climate change.

We often hear about natural selection and survival of the fittest when applied to the animal kingdom but, if this hypothesis is correct, natural selection is being played out in the plant kingdom with lethal and devastating consequences. It is believed that this trend of grasslands usurping forests has been happening over tens of millions of years - before man came on the scene. However, there is every possibility that man-made greenhouse gases are speeding up the process. This Darwinian war of attrition will inexorably lead to a stable state in which grasslands will completely replace forests. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions will only delay the inevitable. And while all this happening, we humans - the self-proclaimed rulers of the planet - are left to watch helplessly and impotently as our houses and towns burn down, and as precious human lives are lost.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and it also coincides with Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Galileo and Copernicus showed that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, and Darwin showed us that humanity is just another species of animal, occupying a tiny limb on the tree of life. To me, these fires are a reminder of these sobering facts. However, although we are not the centre of universe, humanity and human nature are a product of nature - we are a part of the universe. To me, that is a source of inspiration.

Why I'm going to be a Vegetarian

2008-12-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

To people who know me, it would come as a big shock to hear that I am even entertaining the idea of becoming a vegetarian, but that’s my aim for 2009. No, I haven't been swayed by the nude antics of the PETA protesters, and I'm not trying to be stylish or trendy. I'm not even doing it for health reasons. From a health point of view there is really nothing wrong with eating lean meat. According to Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works, "though plant foods supply calories and other nutrients, meat is a complete protein containing all twenty amino acids, and provides energy-rich fat and indispensable fatty acids". And humans have a long history of eating meat; analysis of the bones of early humans reveals that lean meat was their main source of sustenance. To explain the reason for my decision, I need to briefly discuss the concept of morality and how I apply it to the animal world.

Early this year, I watched a 2006 episode of Doctor Who called “The Age of Steel”. In the episode, a mad entrepreneur named Lumic planned to convert humanity into a race of cybermen – with Lumic as their leader. Cybermen are humanoid beings, have metal skins, and walk around like heavy robots. They speak with monotone robot-like voices and – most importantly – experience no emotions or feelings (thus making them more efficient killing machines): they don’t experience fear, guilt, love, joy, embarrassment, sympathy – none of the feelings and emotions that make us human. In fact such emotions are not exclusively human, but the episode made me wonder: how would our planet have evolved if humans were deprived of emotions?

In a world without emotions, there would be no ethical standards; there would be no altruism, no kindness when it is deserved, no punishment when it is deserved, and no sense of guilt or embarrassment. Knowing that our neighbours experience the same feelings and emotions that we do means that humans have gradually had to develop moral and ethical principles that promote cooperative behaviour. In fact, I believe that this is why humans have invented deities and religions – e.g. an authority to validate and enforce these ethical principles. Many religious people wonder how humans can be “good” without religion. They insist that, without religious guidance, we impure humans would have no incentive to be good. This would be the case if we had never developed emotions. Presumably, in the Doctor Who episode, if the Doctor had not thwarted him, Lumic would somehow have wielded a godlike authority and enforced rules and regulations on the cybermen so that a cyberman society would probably function as he planned ... at least for a while. But Lumic was a product of human evolution. Humans have evolved a moral sense, and it is due to our inbuilt feelings and emotions (The Origin of Virtue by Matt Ridley discusses the Darwinian origin of morality in a very clear manner). I believe that humanity would never have developed ethical rules and morality, and it would never have progressed to its current dominance, had we been deprived of feelings and emotions.

However, morality is not hardwired into our DNA; human effort ensures that it is ever-changing. For example, during biblical times, it was okay to own slaves – but today it is morally repugnant; barely half a century ago, black people in the U.S were treated like animals, but today they have the exact same rights as white people; today women in Western society have the identical rights as men, but this was not always the case.
One day, perhaps the ever-increasing circle of morality will also encompass parts of the animal kingdom. I believe that some animals experience feelings such as empathy, sadness, joy, and even guilt ... any dog-owner (especially my friend Fiona) would attest to that. I wonder how many other members of the animal kingdom have such feelings ... and if they do, how can we humans mistreat them and eat them? In 2008, I attempted to become a vegetarian but it seems I didn’t do it properly as I developed some minor health problems as a result. In 2009, I’ll do it properly.

The Music of Life

2008-08-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

This week we heard the incredible report from Germany of the world’s first double arm transplant; a man who had lost both his arms years ago has been given new arms which came from a young man who died shortly before the surgery. Much has been said about the possibility of rejection of the new arms, and the crucial problem of blood flow. But there is another problem: the man’s brain has to learn to recognise that the new arms are actually his arms. This may involve many months (if not years) of physiotherapy before the recipient will actually be able to move the arms. However, physiotherapy might not be enough; for those arms to become more than just two lumps of living flesh, perhaps music will be needed.

It reminds me of an extraordinary little book by Oliver Sacks called A Leg to Stand On. Sacks is a prominent neurologist who has written some incredible books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and An Anthropologist on Mars where he writes about neurological case studies. But in this particular book (written in the 1980s), Sacks himself becomes the humble patient. In 1974, Oliver Sacks had a serious accident, rupturing the main tendon of his left leg. He underwent an operation to repair the leg, but was left with absolutely no feeling in the limb. But it was worse; he had the feeling of the leg’s extinction – that the leg was not his own leg – it was just an object dissociated from his body. It seems that since the leg was inactivated for a significant amount of time, it had lost its place in the brain’s sensory cortex. Its place was quickly taken over by mappings of the rest of the body so that Sacks’ body map which is represented in the cortex had no place for the leg; the brain’s body map represented a one-legged man. This is very interesting; body-image is not fixed in the brain, but is something that adapts itself all the time to experience. So Sacks had no conscious access to his leg so, the left leg he saw before him did not belong to him.
It is not possible for any spontaneous revival of a part of the cortical body map that has vanished to occur; there needs to be creation of a new organization, and this can only be achieved by new experiences, new stimuli and actions. This was a particularly distressing time for Oliver Sacks; he had effectively lost his leg, and it seemed that no amount of physiotherapy could reunite him with his leg. During one of his physiotherapy sessions, he even resorted to a convoluted type of 'walking', where he would calculate each step fully in advance (with reference to visual landmarks such as furniture and walls), and then make an appropriate flexion-movement of the hip. This ridiculous manner of locomotion was a completely conscious process, but the walking that we take for granted is automatic and unconscious. However, the first signs that the leg’s return was imminent came when he heard a familiar musical piece in his mind – a piece he had been repeatedly listening to the day before. Here is how Sacks described the experience:

"And suddenly – into the silence, the silent twittering of motionless frozen images – came music, glorious music. Mendelssohn, fortissimo! Life, intoxicating movement! And, as suddenly, without thinking, without intending whatever, I found myself walking, easily, with the music. And, as suddenly, in the moment that this inner music started, the Mendelssohn which had been summoned and hallucinated by my soul, and in the very moment that my 'motor' music, my kinetic melody, my walking came back – in this self-same moment the leg came back. Suddenly, with no warning, no transition whatever, the leg felt alive, and real, and mine, its moment of actualisation precisely consonant with the spontaneous quickening, walking and music. ... I believed in my leg, I knew how to walk ...

... It was as if I suddenly remembered how to walk – indeed, 'not as if'. I remembered how to walk. All of a sudden I remembered walking’s natural, unconscious rhythm and melody; it came to me.

... I was doing it perfectly and easily, with no conscious counting or calculation whatever, but simply giving myself to the activity’s own tempo, pulsion and rhythm."

But then music in his mind died, and it resulted in a relapse:

"... I had a sudden and unexpected relapse – suddenly forgot my kinetic melody, forgot how to walk. In this moment, as suddenly as if the needle had been lifted from a record, the inner playing of Mendelssohn stopped, and in the instant it stopped, my walking stopped too. Suddenly the leg ceased to be stable and real and reverted to its cinematic delirium, its awful wild jumping of shapes, sizes, frames."

"And in that moment, when the body became action, the leg, the flesh became quick and alive, the flesh became music, incarnate solid music. All of me, body and soul, became music in that moment."

This is an application of music therapy. Music is a mysterious thing. Not all of us can play a musical instrument or carry a tune (I can do neither of these things), but we spend a lot of our time enjoying music; it can alter our moods, it bonds groups of people together, and it can release tension. It varies between cultures and historical periods, but every culture has it – just like language. Is music hard-wired in our brains? Noam Chomsky taught us that all the world’s languages are based on a universal grammar module that is hard-wired in the brain; is there a “music module” hard-wired in every brain? According to musicologists like Fred Lerdahl and Heinrich Schenker, this is most probably the case. For our brains to have evolved something as complex as a universal music module means that it must have some survival value (just like language) – it’s not just there for our enjoyment and amusement. Maybe each of us carries our song within us – a "kinetic melody", a rhythm of life. I’ll stop typing and just sit back and listen to that classical guitar CD playing in the background of my lounge-room ... how about you?

The Most Powerful Computer

2008-02-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

It was exactly 12 years ago when the then chess world champion Garry Kasparov defeated super computer Deep Blue in a chess match. He won by a score of 4-2, and it seems that humanity had prevailed over the threat of digital dominance. But just over a year later, a new and improved Deep Blue exacted its revenge, defeating Kasparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5. I remember following this historical match over the internet; a match between a flesh and blood human and a cold calculating super computer that was said to have the ability to analyze 200 million chess positions a second. A defeat over the world champion (and arguably the greatest chess-player in history) was indeed an impressive thing. Immediately after the match, newspapers were hailing a new era where computers had become intelligent, in the sense that they could even think for themselves. Even Kasparov himself commented that Deep Blue's moves appeared to exhibit human-like qualities of deep intelligence and creativity.

However, in spite of Deep Blue's awesome processing power, Kasparov won the first game of the six-game match, lost game 2 (he actually resigned in a drawn position), drew games 3, 4 and 5, and only lost game 6 due to tiredness and emotional strain. So Deep Blue's win wasn't as convincing as it seemed. But Deep Blue's chess style was based on raw processing power and an "opening book" containing 4000 positions and 700,000 grandmaster (human) games. It used its awesome calculating powers to find the best possible move in a position, but it was not "intelligent". It did not play like a human. Although a computer can calculate positions much faster than any human, it's calculating abilities are not necessarily more efficient than a human's. Computers lack the human skills of intuition and evaluation. A human grandmaster can consider the most likely moves and responses and reject the others. Deep Blue was merely a chess position calculator whereas Kasparov plays chess to at least Deep Blue's level, speaks Russian and English, tell jokes, drive a car, have meaningful relationships, etc. Modern computers are still very far from being able to emulate true human intelligence, even though computers like Deep Blue may pass the "Turing test" in which it can prove its intelligence by fooling a human into thinking that he/she is dealing with a human.
What's really lacking in modern computers is the kind of intuition and imagination that makes us human and allows us (for example) to make remarkable scientific discoveries and gain insight into the workings of the universe. For example, when James Clerk Maxwell originally formulated his 4 equations relating electric charges and currents with electric and magnetic fields, he felt that something was missing. He took an intuitive leap of faith - something that no computer can do - and introduced an additional term to one of the equations - the so-called displacement current. This piece of inspiration, which was not based on any logic or experiment, implied the existence of electromagnetic radiation, paving the way for some of the things we take for granted today, like televisions, telephones, power stations, street lights, etc. Computers as we know them cannot even come close to this behaviour; they are simply our slaves; we write software instructions that basically break down complex ideas into small steps that a stupid machine can deal with.
The human brain is the most powerful computer on Earth. It is a miracle of nature that has evolved only once on our planet. With its 10^11 neurons and perhaps 100 trillion connections between neurons, it is without doubt the most complicated thing on Earth. Can the human brain fully understand the universe? Since the brain is part of the universe, it seems to silly to suggest that the part can understand the whole.
It is estimated that the observable universe is made up of 10^80 elementary particles. The maximum amount of information our brains can know is "only" 100 trillion (10^14) pieces, so it seems a futile exercise. However, science has shown that the universe is governed by natural laws; i.e. there are patterns and there is order in the universe - it is not just a random assortment of 10^80 particles (if it were, galaxies, planets and life would never have arisen), so we don't need to know 10^80 pieces of information in order to understand the universe. Some of these natural laws may well turn out to be very complicated; too complex for the storage capacity of our brains to handle - but we can use our digital slaves for data storage. If the universe is finite, I believe the time will come come when humanity - with the help of the internet that connects humans together, and with the passage of time - will be able to fully comprehend it.
Personally I would not like to live in a universe where everything is knowable and there are no mysteries. For me there is no greater pleasure in life than the feeling I get from understanding some scientific concept. It is for this reason that I have returned to study at my age, and it is also for this reason that I am constantly reading and learning. There are many others like me, and this is why humanity, the most powerful computer in the universe, will one day learn the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Work makes you free???

2007-12-15T17:43:00.001-08:00

Arbeit macht frei (work brings freedom) - a slogan placed at the entrances of Nazi concentration camps

Hombre que trabaja pierde tiempo precioso (a man who works wastes precious time) - Cuban proverb

I recently changed jobs after only one year. I liked my work-colleagues and was sad to leave them, but I quit because the job was mind-numbingly boring and unchallenging, and I'd be damned if I stayed in such a job for too long. I feel lucky and privileged that I am able to turn my back on a job and find something better; most people have no choice but to stay in their jobs, whether they like it or not.
Just the other day, I noticed a policeman directing traffic at an intersection. I imagine that when this guy was a kid, he probably had a burning desire to be a cop; perhaps he idolized TV law-enforcers like Columbo and Starsky & Hutch, and fantasized about hunting down bad guys and bringing them to justice. But there he was - a police constable - and he certainly didn't look happy. I wonder how many teenagers are out there dreaming of becoming taxi-drivers or garbage collectors or office administrators. Yet there are people doing these very jobs - whether they like it or not. And how many people out there would quit their jobs if somebody could guarantee them an annual stipend of 50 or 60 thousand Australian dollars? I'd say that millions of people would jump at such an offer. Would you?

It has been argued that work gives people freedom and prosperity. In fact, in the recent Australian election campaign, the former prime minister constantly reminded us of how "Australians have never been better off". In Australia - as in most of the developed world - the stock market is at near-record highs, and unemployment is very low. Our overall wealth seems to confirm Howard's assertion - but look beneath the surface and you get a different picture. Yes, unemployment is low, but there are many people working in low-paying and part-time jobs who are not counted in the statistics. In addition to this, most of the workforce has experienced a decline in real wages in the past 30 years. In order to reach the standard of living of 30 years ago, most people have to work longer hours. This can be illustrated in the following datum: in the past 20 years, the starting wage for an newly qualified electronic engineer rose by an average of 3.5% per year. In the same period, the average house price in Melbourne rose by 8-10% per year. Hard work pays off less than it used to!
So how come we're so wealthy overall? How come John Howard can brag about the wealth of the Australian people? Wealth comes from capital gains of investments - shares, real estate, businesses; however, in Australia, the wealthiest 10% of households owns 90% of shares (outside of superannuation). The average worker is unable to invest much (if at all) because he/she is unable to save enough. The rich get richer and the working poor are working harder than ever before.
Obviously people have to work to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families - that's enough of a motivation for us to work in jobs we don't like. But there are other motivations: people have come to regard their jobs as means to getting the money needed to purchase items that are being marketed to them. As Madonna sang "we are living in a material world" and people are judged by the goods they possess. We are encouraged to go into debt to buy the consumer goods that advertising companies tell us we need; the message is that life is short, so why wait to buy the things you want? One of the most insidious things I've seen is the way investment strategies are marketed by "respectable" current affairs shows like Today Tonight. Every once in a while on Today Tonight, there is an "inspirational" story of a person who has become fabulously rich by borrowing heavily and gearing into property. We are shown the image of a successful investor driving a flashy car and looking very prosperous with the implied message: "dear viewer, if this average unremarkable person can go from rags to riches, why can't you?" The trouble is that when the average person uses a lot of "other people's money" to fund investments, he/she must work hard to service the debt. And as our wealth increases, so does our spending. All this in the hope of making your dreams come true ... well, the dreams that advertising companies push upon us. I worked with a guy who is still working in a job he hates, and reports to managers he loathes, but he can't quit because he has investment debts to service. Last I heard from him, he was absolutely miserable.
So what's the answer? We can't all work in our dream job, yet we all have to eat. I know of 2 people who seem to have things worked out. John worked very hard for a number of years for the same company. Due to market conditions, he was retrenched from his job and was fortunate enough to receive a generous payout. The payout was enough for him to pay off his mortgage and other debts. With no dependents and financial commitments, he chooses to live off unemployment benefits and enjoys his hobbies. Such a very simple life may not be to everybody's liking but John has never been happier.
Another case is that of Simone. Many years ago, she wrote a small software package and sold it for a small fortune. She invested every cent of the proceeds in the Australian stock market. Today her shares are worth over a million dollars and yielding a gross income of 60,000 Australian dollars. Rather than working and investing to make even more money, she retired at the young age of 40 and now lives a simple yet pleasant life, spending her time writing, painting and occasionally travelling.

Don't fall for the images that advertising companies are trying to sell us; they are carrots used by big corporations to make us work even harder. Ultimately, those ideals will not make us happy, but will only serve to make the greedy corporations richer. Simplify your life; do you really need that plasma TV and that expensive car? If you simplify your life, chances are you'll be much happier and maybe you can be freed from the clutches of the greedy corporate monster.

How the present shapes the past

2007-12-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

"The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming." -- Freeman Dyson

Much has been written about the weirdness of quantum mechanics - for example, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the wave-particle duality of light, and entanglement - however, I've just come across something mind-blowing after reading "The Goldilocks Enigma" by Paul Davies. This quantum weirdness might just explain why life exists - i.e. why the universe is "just right" for life to exist. It can explain why the laws of physics and the constants of nature are just right for life to emerge. It can explain how these laws came to be. The laws of physics can be likened to a kind of software, while the physical universe is like a giant computer - the hardware. The software cannot exist without the hardware, so what role does quantum mechanics have in the cosmic software development?

I recently watched an episode of Doctor Who, called "Blink", in which the Doctor battles against a group of Weeping Angels. The Doctor says that they are quantum-locked; when they are being observed (presumably by conscious beings), they turn to stone. But as soon as nobody is watching, they move quickly and are deadly. A touch sends their victims into the past to live out their lives before they were even born; the Angels then feed on the "potential energy" of the lives their victims would have lived in the present.
Quantum-locked: This is like the quantum weirdness which suggests that the world has no well-defined structure until a mind observes it. This is the weirdness that emerges from the mystery of what happens when the wave function of a quantum system is collapsed by the act of measurement. In quantum mechanics, the wave function is a mathematical expression that gives the probabilities that when a quantum system is measured, certain variables - e.g. position, velocity, spin - will instantly acquire values. These probabilities are not the same as those we face when, say, flipping a coin - which is only due to our ignorance of the forces acting on the coin.
The much-described double-slit experiment illustrates the quantum weirdness very well. In this experiment, light is shone at a solid thin plate that has two slits cut into it. A photographic plate is set up to record what comes through those slits. In the case where the light from both slits arrives at the photographic plate in phase, the waves reinforce each other and produce a bright band. Where they arrive out of phase, they cancel each other out, producing a dark band. Thus we get an interference pattern of bright and dark bands. The remarkable thing is that the same thing happens when the brightness of the light is turned down to the point where single photons are directed toward the double slits - implying that, although each photon passes through only one slit, it somehow interferes with itself(!) causing a pattern to emerge on the photographic plate. Even spookier: if we try to put detectors at the slits to see which one each photon actually goes through, no interference pattern results. If we don't look, the photon exhibits a wavelike behaviour but, as soon as we look, the photon behaves as a particle.

So, what has all this to do with life in the universe? John Wheeler added a new twist to the double-slit experiment; an observer waits until long after the light has passed through the slits before choosing to see which slit the photon went through. By doing this, the interference pattern is destroyed. The observation you have made affects the past - i.e. whether the photon previously behaved as a wave or a particle!!! We could wait a few seconds or billions of years - it makes no difference to the result. Apparently, this behaviour has been confirmed by experiment. The idea is that, due to the existence of observers in the universe at the moment (in other words, the existence of life), it means that life can emerge by acts of quantum observation into the past. The laws of physics were not produced ready-made from the big bang, but emerged over time since the big bang and have been fine-tuned ever since by quantum observations. So we have a situation where the Universe and its laws explain life, and life explains the the Universe and its laws - a nice iterative process. Is this concept testable? Can it be modeled mathematically? What does it mean for the concept of time? I don't know, but it's certainly an intriguing, outrageous and mind-blowing idea.

The Human-Supernova Epidemic

2007-10-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

"Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty." - William Shakespeare (King Henry IV)

"Obesity is a condition which proves that the Lord does not help those who help themselves and help themselves and help themselves." - Unknown

When a star reaches the red giant phase of its life, and the iron group of elements are made within the central core, it has reached a very critical stage in its existence. Critical because certain factors will now determine whether the star will survive or explode.
A mass limit for the star exists, and it is around 6 times the solar mass. If a star weighs in below this limit, it will have a long, peaceful and safe future. It will gradually eject small parts of its outer layer. With time, if it manages to blow off enough mass, it will survive for a long time as a white dwarf. If the mass of the white dwarf happens to be greater than the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses, it could end up in the more compact form of a neutron star.
However, if a star is unfortunate enough to be over the critical mass period when it is in the red giant stage - i.e. greater than 6 solar masses - a very traumatic and violent future awaits it; it will explode and become a supernova.
And so it is with us humans. As we get to middle age, our doctors advise us to keep our weight down. The size of a person's waist is an indication of his/her risk of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, etc. - not to mention the psychological effects that come with being overweight. Obesity has been associated with tens of thousands of deaths each year. It has been attributed to our sedentary lifestyles. Binge eating and "comfort food" eating is also blamed; in neurological terms, drug addiction and binge eating are not dissimilar. Then there is the genetic component - some people may just be more predisposed to putting on weight. When you think about it, you never see a 10kg canary, so there must be something in the DNA that regulates size and weight. But genetic factors cannot explain the "obesity epidemic" that we are seeing. The rapidity with which waistlines in the western world are expanding is unprecedented. It has become more common to see children suffering from "old people's diseases" such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Make no mistake, this is an epidemic and this generation of young people will be the first in Australian history to die younger than their parents' generation. It's easy enough to blame fast-food outlets, and we can bemoan our busy lifestyles that don't allow us the time to exercise and to cook healthy meals. I believe that it is indeed our busy lifestyles that are the root cause of this obesity epidemic. People forsake their health and well being in order to chase the almighty dollar. Mothers are too busy working and no longer have the time to make their children's lunches; they give their kids $10 lunch-money, which will most likely be spent on junk food, and then blame fast-food outlets for selling unhealthy food to their precious children. People are too busy cook for themselves, so they entrust their diets to the restaurant around the corner, or to the Pizza Hut delivery boy. After a hard day's work, people are too tired to exercise, so they flop on the couch and watch the next gripping installment of "Big Brother" or "Dancing with the Stars".
We can learn from our celestial friends. Our Sun, the star that gives us life, will never end its life as a supernova because it is too small and lean. If we don't want to end up as a "human supernova", we must do everything we can to keep our weight down, and the only way to do this is to live a healthy lifestyle. Forget about things like diet pills, stomach stapling, weight-watchers programs, crash-dieting and all the drivel that gets printed in those mindless glossy women's magazines. The solution is simple: eat less, eat healthy, eat often, and make exercise a regular part of your life. No time or energy to cook or exercise? Then simplify your life. Your life, and your children's lives, depend on it.

The clock is ticking

2007-09-15T23:16:00.001-07:00

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. - William Faulkner

In August 1967, a signal from the heavens was detected. It appeared to come from a radio source in outer space, and it was in the form of extremely regular radio pulses. Their period, that is the time difference between two consecutive pulses, was measured to be 1.3373011512 second. To quote the period to an accuracy of 10 decimal places was unprecedented. Were these signals from an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization?

Science fiction buffs were to be disappointed. The signals were from a pulsar, christened with the name "CP 1919" - CP standing for "Cambridge Pulsar" and 1919 representing its coordinates in the sky (sidereal time 19h 19m). Since 1967, many more pulsars have been detected, but we still do not have a clear picture of exactly how they work, although we know that they must be neutron stars. Perhaps the most accepted model of a pulsar was proposed by astrophysicist Tommy Gold. It is of a spinning neutron star, with the pulse period being the period of rotation of the star about its axis. You see, a neutron star is surrounded by an "atmosphere" of charged particles, and as it spins so does the atmosphere, carried along by the star's gravitational pull. These particles may move at close to speed of light, and may generate electromagnetic waves in the presence of magnetic fields. However, with the passage of time, a neutron star's spin slows down, causing its pulse period to increase ... but that takes a long time.

On Earth, we define universal time in terms of the caesium clock, where one second is defined as the time it takes for 9192631770 cycles of radiation emitted during the transition two specified energy levels of a caesium-133 atom. The time intervals of such transitions are not always the same but, by averaging over several such transitions, we can arrive at a steady period.

How does the accuracy of "pulsar clock" measure up against a caesium clock? To measure the stability of clocks, we use the Allan variance. Such measurements show that, over short time scales (e.g. a month), the pulsar's period is not as stable, but over longer time scales (years), the pulsar is much more stable.

The late great Carl Sagan wrote in his book "Billions and Billions":
Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.
Our civilization also dances to the tune of a few atoms changing state but one day, the machinations of our well-oiled societies will be be dictated to by faded stars in their death throes.

Are you master of your domain?

2007-08-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

"I must be walking in my sleep, but how can I be walking in my sleep if I know enough to KNOW I’m walking in my sleep? Ha, ha, ha, tsk, tsk, tsk. The strange things people do in their sleep … especially when they’re awake." – Daffy Duck

In 1911, French physician Edouard Claparede reported the case of a female patient who had lost her ability to create new memories. Each time Claparede walked into the room, he had to reintroduce himself to her, as she had no recollection of ever having met him – even though she may have spoken to him moments earlier. One day, he decided to do an experiment. As usual, he entered the room, and held out his hand to greet her, and as usual she shook his hand. But this time, Claparede had concealed a tack in the palm of his hand, and pricked her with it – obviously a painful experience. The next time he returned to the room, she still did not recognise him but she refused to shake his hand; she did not know why she wouldn't shake his hand – she just wouldn't. She had subconsciously learned that shaking hands with Claparede would cause her harm, and her brain – in fact, her subconscious mind – stored the bad experience in memory, to prevent the painful experience from reoccurring (even though she consciously had no recollection of what caused the unpleasantness).

Clarapede's patient, and even Daffy Duck, are extreme examples which illustrate that there are things going on in our minds that we are not aware of. If I may steal yet another quote from Seinfeld, we are not really "masters of our domains".

Psychologists have long been aware that small, unnoticeable stimuli often fail to be consciously perceived, yet may lead to a behavioural response. Fifty years ago, Vance Packard, with his bestseller "The Hidden Persuaders" popularized this "subliminal perception" with the famous story of the messages "DRINK COKE" and "EAT POPCORN" flashed briefly on the screen during a movie at the cinema. This messages were flashed so quickly - only for one third of a millisecond - that the viewers did not consciously perceive them, but the intention was to get the viewers to consume more coke and popcorn. Did it work? Well, it was claimed that Coke sales increased by 18 percent and popcorn sales increased by 58 percent after this experiment, although there are doubts about these claims.

In his book "The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Advertising," August Bullock argues the case that subtle kinds of subliminal messages certainly do affect behaviour and they are widely used by advertisers to try and subvert our free will. Bullock argues that , since the 1950s, optical illusions and double meanings have been secretly embedded in mass media in order to manipulate the public unconsciously.

The jury is still out on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising and, indeed, there is little evidence that subliminal stimuli can influence our actions or attitudes. But scientific studies - particularly those conducted by Anthony Marcel in the 1970s - have established the phenomenon in a well-controlled way. Marcel found that words presented to too fast to be consciously identified are still processed in the brain, at least to the level of meaning. For example, if the word "river" is flashed for a very short time , a person will deny having seen anything. But if this person is then asked to choose a word that goes with "bank", he or she is more likely to choose "boat" instead of "money". Brain scans have shown that weak stimuli of short duration activate particular brain regions without a person being conscious of them.

Examples of subliminal perception can be found in people with neurological damage - much like in the example of Clarapede's patient. One example is a syndrome called blindsight. Patients with blindsight have damage to the primary visual cortex - just where the optical signals reach the cortex. Blindsight patients receive visual information from the world, but they say they are not conscious of it. If you show them an object they claim not to see it; yet forced to guess, they are surprisingly accurate. They can reach for the visual object, point to its location, and even track it with their eyes. Yet, they vehemently insist that they have no visual experience of the object. Another neurological syndrome in which subliminal perception occurs is prosopagnosia or face agnosia. Patients with prosopagnosia are unable to recognize familiar faces. Although they may be aware that they are looking at a person's face, they are unable to say who the person may be. Prosapagnosics report that they have no awareness of perceiving any information regarding whose face they may be viewing. Yet, despite this absence of conscious awareness, some patients with prosapagnosia are able to choose which of two names goes with each familiar face that they claim not to be able to recognize.

Much of what we do is unconscious. When you and I read a sentence such as this one, there is much more activity going on unconsciously than consciously. But try reading this sentence upside down, and you will probably become conscious of reading every word ... you may even be talking to yourself as you're reading it. If we could take a scan of your brain as you are doing your upside down reading, we would see much more intense activity than if you were to read right side up. Any skill that you have to learn - driving a car, or a new language, or upside down reading - becomes automatic when practiced for a long time, until it becomes second nature to us, and most of the activity unconscious.

Since so much of our behaviour and activities are handled unconsciously, how can humans ever claim to have total free will? How can we say that we are truly masters of our domain?

Brahma's home

2007-08-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting Hindu story about Brahma, the God who created the universe. A king named Kukudmi had a beautiful daughter named Revati who attracted many male suitors. Kukudmi wanted to make sure that his daughter would make the right choice in choosing a husband so he decided to consult Brahma. He went to Brahma's home together with his lovely daughter. Brahma was very busy with some God business and asked Kukudmi to wait a moment. A moment later, Brahma came out and asked the king the purpose of his visit. Kukudmi explained the situation, and asked Brahma for advice about selecting the right man from all those suitors. Brahma laughed and said, "All those suitors are dead and gone. Although you waited at my home for only a moment, during that period, thousands of years have passed on Earth". As you may well understand, the king was speechless. However, Brahma was able to at least solve one of Kukudmi's problems: "Go back to your kingdom", Brahma said, "and there you will find a suitable boy called Balarama for your daughter."

Presumably, Kukudmi and Revati returned to their kingdom thousands of years after their departure; they had travelled forward in time.

Time travel raises a number of strange issues and paradoxes. For example, somebody might travel into the past and murder his mother when she was an infant. If the infant dies, she can never become the mother of the time traveller. But that would mean that the time traveller was never born, so he could never go back to murder his mother.

Another oddity that can arise from time travel is illustrated by the following example: A man travels 1 year into the future and reads an article, in a scientific journal, about a revolutionary theory that unifies relativity and quantum theory. Our hero then returns to his own time and teaches the theory to his student, who then writes it up in a journal. The article written by the student is the very same one that the time traveller read. So where did the the revolutionary theory come from? Not from the student; the time traveller gave it to him. Nor did it come from the time traveller; he merely read it in a journal. The theory seemingly came from nowhere. How bizarre!

Of course this is science fiction. Although Einstein's equations do not disallow time travel into the past, there is as yet no physical evidence to show that it is possible. But time travel into the future is indeed possible and has been observed. Anybody who is even a little familiar with special relativity has heard about the "twin paradox". It goes like this: Betty and Bill are twins. Betty gets into a spaceship and travels at high speed to a nearby star and then turns back and returns home. On her return, she finds that 10 years have elapsed on Earth, but only 1 year had elapsed in Betty's spaceship during her journey. Bill (her twin brother) is now 9 years older than Betty, even though they were both born on the very same date. This is due to time dilation, which occurs when motion occurs at close to the speed of light. We never notice it because we move at much slower speeds, but the phenomenon of time dilation has been tested with atomic clocks which shows that time is really slowed by motion. It can also be seen with particles. A muon has a half-life of around 2 microseconds, but when sped up to close to the speed of light, the muon's half-life has been seen to increase dramatically. So time travel to the future is a proven fact!

Another way to travel forward in time is with gravity. Gravity slows down time; time on the ground floor of a skysscraper runs slower than on the 40th floor, but the effect is neglibile and unnoticeable. But on the surface of a neutron stat, the gravity is so strong that time slows significantly - by around 30-40 percent. To observers on Earth, the clocks on a neutron star will appear to go slower than those on Earth. Obviously there are no clocks on any neutron stars - this is just an analogy - but how do we know for sure? Well, instead of comparing clocks, we see changes in the frequencies of spectral lines, which reflect the changes in the atomic systems at the source. The frequency of light from the neutron star will appear reduced, and the increased wavelengths will shift toward the red end of the spectrum. This is the so-called gravitational red shift.

I won't say that Brahma lives on a neutron star - it's not massive enough to slow time down in the way suggested by the story - but maybe he has a holiday house not far from a black hole.

A Whole Lot of Nothing

2007-08-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld try to sell an idea for a new TV show to an NBC executive:

GEORGE: I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: NOTHING.
NBC BOSS: Nothing?

GEORGE: (Smiling) Nothing.
NBC BOSS: (Unimpressed) What does that mean?
NBC BOSS: The show is about nothing.
JERRY: (To George) Well, it's not about nothing.
GEORGE: (To Jerry) No, it's about nothing.

George then continues to explain his idea to an increasingly annoyed NBC boss, and the dialogue continues:

NBC BOSS: How is that a show?
JERRY: Well, uh, maybe something happens on the way to work.
GEORGE: No, no, no. Nothing happens.
JERRY: Well, something happens.
NBC BOSS: Well, why am I watching it?
GEORGE: Because it's on TV.
NBC BOSS: Not yet. (in a threatening tone)

I know a guy who has dedicated a whole blog to the concept of nothingness but what is exactly Nothing, and where can we find it? We are told that there are regions in outer space where there is nothing - a void; is this really true? Is it possible to find the void closer to home - say, on Earth?

Believe it or not, the void constitutes a big part of the structure of everyday things. Let's consider an atom; if we were to magnify the size of an atom so that it has a diameter of 100 metres, it's nucleus would have the size of a billiard ball. So the main constituent of an atom is ... well ... nothing. Everything that surrounds us - people, diamonds, and even mother Earth herself is made up of empty space punctuated by atomic nuclei and electrons. If we were to take a skyscraper, and remove all the empty space that exists in its constituent atoms, we would be left with an object the size of a marble with a mass of 50,000 tonnes; who would've thought that a skyscraper could be so heavy. But is this empty space really empty? Is it a true void?

Aristotle said that nature abhors a vacuum, but vacuums are everywhere - e.g. in light bulbs and in the cathode ray tubes of out televisions. There is no doubt that a section of space can be cleared of all ordinary matter. But even after all solids, liquids and gases have been eliminated from a container, the remaining space still has a complex structure; it is filled with electromagnetic radiation. Part of this radiation is of a thermal nature and can be eliminated by lowering the temperature. Other sources of invisible radiation are apparent as soon as we turn on a television or a radio: signals of TV shows such as Big Brother and the six o'clock news can be found even in a vacuum. What if all the man-made sources of radiation were to be switched off? Would we then have a perfect vacuum in our frozen container? There is another form of energy that is intrinsic and cannot be eliminated. It is the so-called zero point energy. Evidence of the existence of zero point energy has been found with the Casimir effect, and its effects are observable in the problems it causes in nanotechnology. The origin of this energy is the quantum fluctuations. In the quantum world, the uncertainty principle allows for particles and antiparticles to suddenly come into existence and then annihilate.

So the void is not really empty. Is there really such a concept as "nothing" or "zero"? Sure, it has been suggested that the mass of a photon or of a graviton is in fact zero, but this is yet to be proven. Has Nothing ever existed? It has been said that the reason why there is Something rather than Nothing is that Nothing is unstable. Did the universe begin with nothing? St. Augustine said that God made the world from "prope nihil" - i.e. almost nothing. This seems to correspond with modern cosmology; it is believed that after the big bang, matter and anti-matter almost annihilated one another and we almost had nothing but there was a slight imperfection in symmetry - there were slightly more quarks than anti-quarks - and this slight imbalance was enough to make possible life, the universe and everything.

It appears that there is no such thing as Nothing. Aristotle was right (for the wrong reasons) that nature truly does abhor a vacuum; the total absence of matter and energy is impossible to obtain. However, attempting to come as close as possible to a state of void is important if we are to understand the nature of matter - particularly at the particle level. This is done by using huge particle accelerators, where particles are made to smash against one another at high velocities and energies in order to study the results of such collisions. Naturally, the paths of these speeding particles should not be impeded by any pesky unwanted particles so, for this reason the tunnel through which the particles are accelerated, is made to be as perfect a vacuum as possible. The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is due to be operational in 2008, and it is hoped that the mysterious Higgs boson (dubbed the "God particle" by Leon Lederman) will be detected ... but only after particle collisions are made in a tunnel filled with near-nothingness.

Mysterious Energy of the Cosmos

2007-07-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

It is claimed by a lot of spiritual and religious teachings that there exists a mysterious psychic or spiritual energy that pervades the entire universe - for example, the Tao of Taoism, the Absolute in Hinduism, and the Void of Buddhism. We may sit back and ridicule such scientifically unproven concepts but, throughout the ages - from ancient times to the present day - science has invoked similar concepts - albeit by rational thought.

The ancient Greeks proposed a mysterious substance that was thought to fill the universe above the Earth. This was the classical aether and, after air, earth, fire and water, it was the fifth element. Aristotle believed that this fifth element was the main constituent of the heavens. He thought that this element was at its purest in the celestial regions, but becomes adulterated in the region below the moon.

In 1748, Georges Le Sage proposed that the force of gravity is the result of tiny undetectable particles or waves moving at high speed in all directions of the universe - a kind of gravitational aether. This theory was discredited, most notably by James Clerk Maxwell.

In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell needed a medium to support his electric and magnetic fields, so he adopted the aether - in this case, the luminiferous aether - in which electric and magnetic fields can vibrate, in the same way as sound waves propagate through the air. In fact, just as the vibration of air is sound, it was thought that the vibration of the aether was electromagnetic waves. This aether was indeed mysterious: it was totally transparent and undetectable, yet it was everywhere - even in a vacuum.
The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 showed that the aether had no effect on light waves, and Albert Einstein dealt the final blow to the concept of a luminiferous aether when his special theory of relativity of 1905 showed that the aether was not necessary.
But this was not the end of aether-type concepts. In 1952, in an effort to explain the particle-wave duality in the quantum world, David Bohm came up with the Guided Wave Theory (GWT). According to Bohm, particles are never waves. However, associated with every particle is an undetectable quantum potential which guides the particle's motion - a guiding wave or pilot wave in an unobservable quantum field. This quantum field permeates all of spacetime but it doesn't diminish with distance and exerts no force. It is a quantum potential that binds the entire universe together into what Bohm called a seamless unbroken wholeness. How does it explain the wave-particle duality? Well, in the case of the famous double-slit experiment, each particle goes through only one slit, but its pilot wave goes through both. And, get this, the pilot wave is able to guide the particles without ever exerting any force on them. Understandably, many physicists do not find GWT very convincing - particularly since it invokes a mysterious field that permeates the entire universe - but mainstream physics tells us that a vacuum is not really empty; it is filled with many virtual particles (quantum foam). And what about the mysterious Higgs field? The Higgs field is a quantum field that allegedly permeates the entire universe and mediated by the hypothetical Higgs boson as a messenger. According to the theory, all particles get their masses from interacting with the Higgs field. Hopefully, when the Large Hadron Collider is up and running in 2008, we will be able to have evidence confirming or denying the existence of this mysterious field.
Even cosmology has its own mysterious, undetectable energy. In 1964, the cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered - a radiation that is thought to be observable everywhere in the universe. This radiation is almost exactly (to 99.999% accuracy) the same temperature of 2.725K everywhere in the sky. According to the Big Bang model of the 1970s, points in the universe that have never been in contact have the same temperatures. This homogeneity is remarkable when it is considered that Einstein's special relativity disallows information transfer faster than the speed of light. How can photons across distant regions of the universe (that have never been in contact) have practically the same temperature? A solution to the problem was proposed in 1981 by Alan Guth, with the Inflationary model. Problem solved (or at least explained). But suddenly a new problem emerged. Inflation predicted a flat universe (referring to its curvature), but astronomical observations revealed that the amount of matter in the universe (baryonic and dark) accounted for only 30-40% of the critical density required for a flat universe. It was also observed that the universe expansion is currently accelerating. The only way to reconcile the inflationary model with the energy density measurements is to introduce a kind of repulsive gravity. Adding this repulsive gravity - or dark energy - gives us the critical density required for a flat universe. This dark energy is a very mysterious field and we have no idea what it could be (some might justifiably say that it is a fudge factor and that there is something wrong with the Big Bang model). The universe seems to be permeated by a matter field with a non-zero potential energy, whose only role seems to be to drive its accelerated expansion.

I wonder if all these undetectable energies and fields - Higgs, GWT, quantum foam, and dark energy - are all one and the same phenomenon. Or do we need to wait for a super genius of the likes of Einstein to explain them away and come up with new and revolutionary ideas?

Free will and Quantum Mechanics

2007-07-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

Before quantum mechanics showed up on the physics scene, life was literally more predictable. Classical physics gave us a deterministic view of the universe and it seemed that, if we somehow knew all the variables in the universe, we could predict what would happen in the future. It was as if God created the universe with a predetermined set of starting conditions and variables, and then left it to run its deterministic course - just like a mechanical clock after having been wound up. But if all is predetermined, what can we say about free will? Does it mean that no matter what we do, our future has already been determined? We may have the illusion of free will but is it just that - an illusion? Then along came a saviour, in the form of quantum mechanics. With quantum mechanics' statistical view of the world we suddenly had indeterminism. For example, if we have a box full of atomic nuclei, we can predict a time when half of them will decay, but we cannot calculate precisely when an individual nucleus will decay. Also, we cannot precisely know both the velocity and the position of an electron, so we can never know the exact starting conditions of a quantum system. Albert Einstein refused to believe in a statistical universe - he thought that quantum mechanics was incomplete and that there were "hidden variables" that could account for the quantum weirdness. John Bell's theory in 1964, followed its experimental confirmation in 1982, has shown us that there are no such hidden variables, and we must live with the weird world of quantum mechanics. But there are still some die-hard physicists that hope for a "classical system" to explain the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. One such physicist is Nobel Prize winner Gerard t'Hooft. In 2006, he wrote a paper The Mathematical Basis For Deterministic Quantum Mechanics where he suggests that, even though particles appear to behave unpredictably, we could indeed predict their behaviour by tracking their underlying states.
When this paper was released in 2006, the magazine New Scientist reported that, if t'Hooft's theory was correct, it would spell an end to the concept of free will. I will assume that the current prevailing view of quantum mechanics is correct and that it is, indeed, probabilistic ... but it doesn't matter.

How do we define free will? One way is: A decision that is not strictly determined by what has gone on before.
British mathematician Roger Penrose linked quantum mechanics to consciousness by proposing that quantum behaviour in the protein structures found in cells (including brain cells) can give rise to consciousness. And consciousness is needed in order for us to have free will. I would like to write a little about Penrose's theory in a subsequent post. But suppose that a decision in my brain is triggered by a quantum event. Since this event is purely random, how could it be due to my free will? By trading determinism with quantum uncertainty, we have transformed the decision from a causal one to a random one. Furthermore, other questions arise when we try to link quantum mechanics with free will:

Even though quantum mechanics may not be deterministic, it does have causality - i.e. there is always a reason or a cause for any phenomenon. For example, if we fire an electron through a double-slit system towards a screen, we will have no idea where precisely on the screen the electron will end up - no matter how carefully we aim (in fact, we don't even know through which slit the electron passed through); but we do know that the electron has ended up on the screen because we caused it to go there. So life is not completely random.

Although, at the quantum level, particle interactions are probabilistic in nature, on larger scales the effects of the uncertainty principle become negligible so that interactions in the macro (real) world become deterministic. Our brain cells as a whole are not of a quantum nature so we don't expect them to behave randomly.

If t'Hooft's theory is correct, and there are hidden variables, then quantum randomness is ruled out but not free will. Something can be deterministic but not computable. Even classical mechanics, with its much-vaunted determinism, is unpredictable. An example is the n-body problem of determining the behaviour of n interacting masses where n is equal to or greater than 3. These masses can be billiard balls or heavenly bodies or anything. We cannot compute with exactness how they will behave. So even a supposedly deterministic system has elements of unpredictability (randomness?).

So, in my opinion, we cannot draw any conclusions about free will from quantum mechanics, and I can't understand why people continue to link the two concepts together.

The Best Book to Read?

2007-07-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Many, many years ago, when I was 6 years old, I attended a public primary school. It wasn't a religious school but we kids were required to attend weekly "religious instruction" classes. Even as a 6 year old kid, I found these classes unpleasant and boring. The teacher would say things like, "God made everything in the world - He made that table and that chair and this classroom ...". I knew very well that a carpenter made tables and chairs and, when the teacher overheard me telling one of my classmates my theory of table creation, she quickly tried to set me straight by gently asking me, "Well, if you're so smart, who do you think made the wood? And who made the carpenter?". I had no answer to such deep questions.
We were told how God somehow allowed his son to die for our sins, but it was never explained why He did such a thing to His beloved boy. And it always worried me that people spoke of somebody called "God", but nobody had ever seen him. I just had the feeling that there was something untruthful and dodgy about religious instruction.

On top of all that, those classes were irritating to me. Apart from having to recite John 3:16 every week, the most irritating thing about those classes was a particular song that we were all required to sing. To this day, I still cringe when I think about it. Here are the words I remember:

The best book to read is the bible
Oh the best book to read is the bible
If you read it every day
It will help you on your way
Oh the best book to read is the bi...ble

This is pure indoctrination and, thankfully, religious instruction is no longer taught to little kids in public primary schools in Australia. I was raised in a non-religious family and I didn't for a moment believe that the bible was the best book to read; I much preferred to read The Cat in the Hat where at least the words rhymed and it reminded me of my pet cat. As I got older, I started to ponder some serious questions, such as: "who really created the carpenter?"; "what was God doing before he created the universe?"; "In Noah's Ark, what did the anteaters eat?"

I haven't got answers to those questions (and neither have you), but one question that can be answered is: "Is the bible the best book to read?". Does the bible really deserve the "good book" label? Is it really a moral guide that will "help you on your way"? Here are a few reasons why I have doubts (note, I use quotes from the New International Version of the bible).

The bible routinely condones slavery:

Leviticus 25:44: "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves". Great! The bible says it's okay for me to capture some New Zealanders and enslave them.

Exodus 21:20-21: "If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property."

Exodus 21:7: "If a man sell his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as men servants do." Yes, the bible has no problem with parents selling their daughters into slavery.

Hey, if you're a married man and want some variety in your life, maybe a second or third wife would do the trick. What does the bible say about polygamy?

Judges 8:30: "He had seventy sons of his own, for he had many wives."

1 Samuel 1:1-2: "... (Elkanah) had two wives; one was called Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah."
Looks like there are no problems with polygamy, as far as the bible is concerned. How about corporal punishment?

Proverbs 26:3: "A whip for the horse, a halter for the donkey, and a rod for the backs of fools."

Proverbs 22:15: "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him."
So, there you have it: a sure cure for foolishness is to beat the hell out of children.
Even the Almighty is not averse to handing out a beating.
Psalms 89:31-2: "If they break my decrees, and fail to keep my commands, I will punish their sin with the rod, their iniquity with flogging."

If you happen to be a homosexual, don't expect much support from the bible:

Leviticus 18:22: "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable." Other versions of the bible use the word "abomination" instead of "detestable"

Okay, that's the Old Testament. However, the New Testament is supposed to be full of love, forgiveness, not to mention Jesus' admirable philosophy of turning of the other cheek. So the New Testament is the one to look to for moral guidance, right? Yes, but proceed with caution; and if you're a kid, get some parental guidance. For example:
In Matthew 15, Jesus displays a shocking racist side to his personality when he refuses to help a non-Jewish woman and says, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs" thus comparing gentile women to dogs. Jesus is normally portrayed as a gentle, mild young man who spreads the philosophy of love and forgiveness; do you feel the love in the air?

How about the following quote from Matthew 23:33: "You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell". Quite the acid tongue, Mr. Christ.

Environmentalists would probably not be too happy with mild-mannered Jesus either. In Mark 11:12-21, Jesus uses his divine powers to put a curse on a fig tree ("May no-one ever eat fruit from you again."), which causes the tree to whither and die. Jesus was certainly no tree-hugging greenie.
Nor is he an animal lover, as seen in Luke 8:27-33 where he exorcises demons from a "possessed" man. The demons beg Jesus not to order them to go into the Abyss. "A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them, and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned."

The bible gives a lot of sound advice regarding morality and ethics, but be careful how you read it. Depending on which parts of it you read, the bible can be seen as allowing mistreatment of children, animals, trees, non-Jews and homosexuals. In Matthew 4:6, the devil himself quotes scripture to back up his own arguments.

Moreover, the whole idea of atonement, which is the centrepiece of the New Testament, is questionable. Jesus - the son of God (or was he God incarnated?) was brutally executed on the cross in atonement for the original sin and for mankind's future sins. In other words, justice was done by sacrificing the life of an innocent person for the sins of the guilty. That's a nice lesson to impart on our children ...

Brahma's Dream

2007-07-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

This week in the press, there was a report about a new theory of the origin of our universe; read about it by clicking HERE. The theory says that the universe goes through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. According to conventional science, if we go back in time - way back - and approach the time of the big bang, we will come to a singularity, in which density, temperature and curvature become infinite; a point where all the laws of physics break down. This is very troubling since infinities are not very welcome in physics equations. However, using the concept of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), it has been shown - by running the LQG equations backwards - that the singularity can be avoided. As the universe collapses, it reaches a point in which it bounces back in a big bang, and the process repeats with the universe expanding. In an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, no two universes will ever be the same. The big bang and big crunch cycle is not new; what is new is that, according to this theory, the birth of our universe is not associated with a singularity and every successive universe is different from the one that preceded it.

But what is LQG? LQG competes with string theory as a "theory of everything" and, like string theory, is an incomplete and unproven (unprovable?) theory. It was developed by rewriting the equations of general relativity in a quantum structure. In this framework, spacetime is made up of tiny loops of 10^-35 metres in diameter. Spacetime is a network that links these loops together in an abstract way. How do we avoid a singularity and why is each universe different? Well, I'm not a physicist and I'm not familiar with the mathematics behind LQG, but I think I can guess how it works. In the case of a big crunch, as the volume becomes ever smaller, it reaches the point of the big bang. Since the universe is composed of finite loops, there can never be a singularity. When the universe reaches its most compact state, it bounces back and forms a new expanding universe. But it will be different from its predecessor. This is due to the uncertainty principle. At the time just before the "big bounce" - when the universe is very small - the amount of uncertainty is very different from that at the time after the big bounce, so the new universe will be different. To understand better how the uncertainty principle brings about a universe that is different from its predecessor, imagine a thought experiment in which we have a bunch of atoms moving around in a closed box. Let's say we try to reverse the motion of every atom at the same time, so that they all return to their starting positions. This makes no sense because we need to know the position of every atom precisely; its velocity must be precisely determined and then reversed while the atom stays in the same position. But Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that this is impossible; it says that we can never simultaneously measure the position and speed of something to perfect accuracy; this is an intrinsic uncertainty and it has nothing to do with the way physicists conduct their experiments or the accuracy of their instruments. So a system such as our universe is, in fact, not reversible because of the uncertainty of the starting conditions.
What does this say about the possibility of life emerging in our universe? Albert Einstein once said, "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world" (of course he was not referring to a personal god). Indeed, slight changes in the constants of nature - constants such as the strength of gravity, the speed of light, the masses of subatomic particles and the strengths of the weak and strong forces - could have made a completely different universe to the one we know and love - perhaps one where life could never arise. Given that there have been many cycles of big bangs crunches and bounces, this universe may have "won the jackpot" where all the constants of nature are set such that the conditions are just right for life to arise and for you and I to be born.

If you are a Hindu philosopher, none of the above should surprise you. Hindu philosophy has always accepted the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe. In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan pointed out how, in Hindu cosmology, the universe undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths, and its timescales are in the same ballpark as those of modern cosmology. Here is a quote from Cosmos:

"There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but a dream of the god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the cosmic dream.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own god dreaming the cosmic dream. These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men."

So, according to Hinduism, the universe is a dream of some god. In my experience, no two dreams are precisely the same, and most of my dreams are of implausible scenarios.

To get an idea of the Hindu timescales, here are some figures: The smallest unit of measurement is the yuga - or era. Each yuga is preceded by a dawn and followed by a dusk which constitute the transition between them. A complete cycle - a mahayuga - consists of four yugas of unequal length. The longest yuga is the first one in the cycle and the shortest is the last one. I won't go into the meanings of each yuga - suffice to say that we are in the last yuga, called the kali yuga. It is believed that we entered the kali yuga in about 3200 BC. Here are the lengths of each of the 4 yugas in solar years:
Satya yuga: 1,728,000 years
Treta yuga: 1,296,000 years
Dwapar yuga: 864,000 years
Kali yuga: 432,000 years
The cycle repeats itself and there are 1000 mahayugas in one day in the life of Brahma (Hindu god). This day of Brahma is called a kalpa and, if you've done your arithmetic, it is 4.32 billion solar years long. Another kalpa is a Brahma night.
In terms of the age of our universe, these Hindu units of time are similar to those of modern cosmology (scientists say that our universe is around 15 billion years old). Compare this with the Christian fundamentalist view that the Earth is a mere 6000 years old. Hinduism is the only major religion that accepts the idea of universes that undergo cycles of expansion and contraction. If we take away all of the mythological nonsense from Hindu religion and replace it with mathematical nonsense, we come very close to the modern religion of cosmology. If you like, we are characters in Brahma's cosmic dream, and we are trying to understand his mind by analyzing and interpreting his dream.

The Placebo Effect

2007-06-30T20:30:00.001-07:00

"It's not a lie if you believe it" - George Costanza from Seinfeld

In his book "Six Easy Pieces", the late Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote:

" ... psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring. It has a theory as to what causes disease - lots of different 'spirits,' etc. The witch doctor has a theory that a disease like malaria is caused by a spirit which comes into the air; it is not cured by shaking a snake over it, but quinine does help malaria. So, if you are sick, I would advise that you go to the witch doctor because he is the man in the tribe who knows the most about the disease; on the other hand, his knowledge is not science. Psychoanalysis has not been checked carefully by experiment, and there is no way to find a list of the number of cases in which it works, the number of cases in which it does not work ..."

He was writing about psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has been called "quackery" and "pseudoscience" and, as Richard Feynman suggests, it has little or no scientific basis; yet it has been successful in helping a lot of people to overcome debilitating mental issues. How is it that it works? It has been suggested that the success of psychoanalysis can be attributed to the placebo effect.

The word "placebo" is Latin for "I will please", and has come to refer to a treatment or substance which is pharmacologically inert (such as a sugar pill) but which may produce therapeutic benefits based only on the power of suggestion; the mind can heal. The opposite of this is "nocebo" - Latin for "I will harm" - where a substance may cause harm based only on the power of suggestion; the mind can incite both physical and mental illness.
The late Arthur Shapiro was a professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and an expert on the placebo effect. In an essay that he co-wrote in 1995, he wrote: "until recently, the history of medical treatment is essentially the history of the placebo effect". He was suggesting that, before the advent of modern medicine, almost all of the myriads of remedies were placebos. Shapiro also noted that patients tend to respond better to new drugs than to older, more established drugs. He argued that a brand new wonder drug draws high expectations on the part of the patients and doctors, and these expectations can become self-fulfilling.
An example of a placebo cure was a cure-all called theriac, which consisted of a large number of ingredients, including opium, hemp and viper flesh. Greek physician Galen was probably the first to describe this medicine, and one of his patients, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, took it regularly. Galen himself realized that the most important ingredients of such remedies is faith - the patients' belief that the treatment will work. Galen wrote: "He cures most successfully in whom the people have the most confidence".
There are modern examples of confirmed cases of the placebo effect in action.
In 1950 in a New York hospital, a group of pregnant women were given a drug by Dr. Stewart Wolf, and told that it would cure them of persistent nausea and vomiting. Sure enough the drug worked like a charm (so to speak) - the women were nausea-free and the only thing that spewed from their mouths were cries of joy. The problem was that the drug they were given was syrup of ipecac which is used to induce vomiting. Thanks to the placebo effect, it actually had the opposite effect.

One of the most incredible examples in the history of medical science is the so-called "mammary artery ligation" procedure which was used by cardiac surgeons to relieve the pain of angina. This involved making incisions in the patient's chest and tying off their mammary arteries (these are arteries just below the ribs). The idea was that if the blood flow through these "superfluous" arteries was stopped, there would be more blood available to flow to the heart and, bingo!, no more pain. The operation had a high success rate over a few decades, with many happy customers reporting improvements. However, it was later found that an even higher success rate was attained by receiving only a simple incision without tying off any arteries, and nothing more. Behold the power of the placebo effect.

This powerful placebo effect is probably one big factor in the diffusion of remedies of questionable efficacy, such as faith healing, homeopathy, new-age holistic healing, vitamins, acupuncture, magnetic pain-relief bracelets and alternative medicines. As mentioned earlier, it has been suggested that psychoanalysis is nothing more than a placebo; in fact, psychoanalysts can enhance their effectiveness by appearing authoritative and knowledgeable - for example, by having their impressive-looking medical degrees and qualifications on display in their consulting rooms.

So how does this placebo effect actually work? Some people have tried to explain it by invoking the concept of classical conditioning. At the turn of the 1900s, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist who experimented with animal behaviour, discovered classical conditioning when an animal learns to associate 2 events - one neutral (the conditioning stimulus) and the other meaningful (the unconditioned stimulus). The animal learns to respond to the normal event even in the absence of the meaningful event. In Pavlov's most famous experiment, a bell was rung just before a piece of meat was given to a dog. At first, the dog did not salivate until it got the meat. Once the dog was able to associate the bell with the meat, it would salivate at the sound of the bell - even if no meat was forthcoming. The bell is the conditioned stimulus, and the meat is the unconditioned stimulus. Eventually, the effect would wear off - the dog would stop salivating at the sound of the bell unless meat was sometimes offered.
Classical conditioning is linked to the "subject-expectancy effect". For example, I might visit a professional healer - a doctor or a psychoanalyst or a counsellor - with a particular issue. The healer might provide some treatment or advice and explain, in an authoritative manner, how my issue will be alleviated. If the healer is convincing in his or her attempt in instilling hope in my heart, my expectations of being cured become high and the good-old placebo effect will kick in and aide me in my recovery. If, on the other hand, the healer is not very positive about my prospects of recovery, there will be a negative expectation on my part and I may become a victim of the nocebo effect.
Another possible explanation might be the power of positive thinking. Positive emotions have been linked to better health. Being in a happy state of mind is associated with decreases in cortisol (the stress hormone implicated in heart disease and cancer) and increased immune function. Being in a positive state of mind also seems to improve treatment outcomes in a lot of chronic ailments.

The placebo effect is best known in relation to pain. People have been known to report a reduction in pain when they think that they are taking a medicine they believe is effective - even though it may just be a sugar-coated tic tac. In such cases, it has been shown by using PET brain scans that this effect is caused by our own brain's production of opioids called endorphins, which reduce pain by plugging into mu-opioid receptors - in much the same way that morphine does. In this scenario, our brain produces pain-dulling chemicals in much the same way that Pavlov's dog salivates at the sound of the bell.

Classical conditioning might explain how the placebo effect is triggered, but it doesn't tell us about the mechanisms that give us the therapeutic benefits.
These days, placebos are commonly used when testing new drugs. Trialling of a new drug usually involves testing on 2 groups of human guinea pigs where one group takes the drug and the other group takes a placebo. Neither group knows what they are taking and, in the case of double-blind trials, neither do the testers. For example, in a trial of a blood-pressure drug in 2000, one third of those who took the placebo reported a reduction in blood pressure. Those who took the drug had a higher success rate, but maybe that was an enhanced placebo effect: they felt a little different after taking the drug, so they truly believed that it wasn't a sugar pill and expected to have an improvement.

Placebo effects have been seen in "cures" for high-blood pressure, cancer, depression, ulcers, and heart disease; how does the placebo effect work in these cases? I don't know, and neither do you. There is a lot of research going on into the mystery of consciousness, but much of what goes on in the brain is unconscious - it happens without our being conscious of it. Knowing about the unconscious - or private life of the brain - could tell us more about ourselves than unlocking the mystery of consciousness. And there is so much we don't know.

Time in Buddhism

2007-06-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favourite novels is Siddhartha, written by Hermann Hesse in 1922. The story follows the life of the main character Siddhartha, and it parallels the life of Buddha on his journey to enlightenment.
Born the son of a Brahmin (a priest caste in Hindu society), Siddhartha was an intelligent, handsome and charismatic young man, who yearned to find the meaning of life. Siddhartha leaves his home join a group of ascetics, fasting and living without possessions. He then meets Gotama the Buddha, and realizes that the ascetic life is not the path to enlightenment, but he also declines joining the Buddha. Instead, he opts for reentering the "real world" hoping that he can learn more about himself, but his life becomes one of decadent hedonism, debauchery and materialism. He becomes disgusted and once again flees.
In the end, he meets a wise ferryman named Vasudeva, who lives by the river. Siddhartha becomes an apprentice to the ferryman, but Vasudeva is a teacher who does not teach; Vasudeva gives Siddhartha food and roof over his head, however, he does not actually impart any of his own wisdom on his apprentice. Vasudeva is a kind of agent for seekers of wisdom (like Siddhartha), who venture to the river to pass from the ordinary world to the world of enlightenment. The ferryman guides Siddhartha back and forth across the river, encouraging him to continue his search for spiritual progress by "learning from the river".

One lesson that Siddhartha learns from the river is that time does not exist; the present is all that matters. Just as the river is in all places at the one moment, life is unified.

" ... the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?"

By using this symbolism, Hesse is invoking the concept of the Buddhist Void (or sunyata). The Void is not nothingness; it is the source of all life and the force that flows through and connects everything in the universe. It is comparable to the Tao in Taoism and the Absolute of Hinduism; it is the indescribable essence of all life in the universe. It also seems comparable to the concept of "dark energy", which is popular in modern cosmology.

Siddhartha compares his own life to a river:

"... I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality. Siddhartha's previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence."

So, Siddhartha comes to the realization that time does not exist and all knowledge exists in the present time and place; thus he can achieve enlightenment.

Eastern philosophies and religions have a different notion of time from what we are used to. In a previous post I quoted a Zen Buddhist to illustrate that, in Buddhism, time cannot be separated from the things that are ever-changing. For example, we like to say "it snows in winter", as if there is a time called "winter". Instead, if we adopt Buddhist thinking, we would say that things like snowfalls, freezing temperatures, and cold winds are the time called winter; there is no time called winter apart from these things, and no time apart from phenomenal things. Time and things are inseparably connected to one another. In Buddhism, there is no concept of a God that created the universe; God as the creator and ruler of the universe does not exist; time and everything in the universe are not creations of God; there is no beginning and no end - no creation and no final judgement.
Since time and things are inseparable, time has no substance and is empty because all things in the universe are impermanent so have no substance. This is completely different from the Christian notion of time; in Christianity, time is real because it is a creation of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas believed God to be outside of time, so He is able to see all his creation in the past, present and future at once. According to Aquinas, even though we can make choices, our futures are predetermined, and God already knows what choices each of us will make.

So if time doesn't really exist, how is it that we come to speak of past, present and future? According to Buddhist thought, we humans discriminate between past, present and future, and we give them substance by attaching name and meaning to them. This everyday notion of time is not reality and is based on fundamental ignorance (or avidya). Unlike the Christian concept of time, time in Buddhism has no beginning and no end.
In order to awaken to true reality, one must do as Hesse's Siddhartha did - i.e. eliminate the concept of time by realizing that it has no substance. This is how Hesse's Siddhartha attained wisdom and enlightenment.
Buddhism does not discriminate between life and death; they are considered instead as one reality. Throughout our lives, each of us is living and dying at the same moment; we are, if you like, living-dying (samsara). It is believed that every moment is a beginning and an end. Time begins and ends at each moment. Time is not seen to be a a one-directional sequence of events, but a series of infinitesimally small independent moments that can move in relation to each other. The whole process of living-dying is concentrated in this moment. As Hesse's Siddhartha said (and quoted above), "Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality".

What about the question of consciousness? At the very least, consciousness requires one to have thoughts in serial order, and this implies a concept of time similar to the one we are accustomed to, right?. Of consciousness, the Dalai Lama has said the following:

"As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being transformed into another present moment"

It's all very heavy stuff, and time is still a mystery; perhaps the ultimate mystery. It seems impossible to try to explain the concept of time without invoking the word "time".
In attempting to answer the mysteries of the universe - time, consciousness, free will, the origins of life - it is instructive to learn about Eastern philosophies, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and apply their teachings to modern science. I think that Albert Einstein said it best when he said:

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."

In future (if such a thing exists), I intend to write about time in modern physics.

The Conscious Universe

2007-06-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

As you are reading this, you are conscious of it; you are experiencing these words as part of your private inner life. At the same time, you are probably feeling some emotions and there may be some thoughts and images going through your mind. You are "conscious". We all know what consciousness is, yet it defies satisfactory definition. I may say that consciousness is my own inner world that only I can access; it's what makes me different to anybody else. I may also use the words "awareness" and "free will" when trying to define consciousness. I am unconscious at night when asleep but, when morning comes I become conscious again. Yet, even when awake, I experience different levels of consciousness: my mind goes into "autopilot mode" while I'm doing housework or watching yet another rerun of "The Simpsons", but I may suddenly hear a car alarm going off in the street and my consciousness is suddenly focused on the task of finding out what's going on.
Varying degrees of consciousness also appear in the animal kingdom, but human consciousness - with its symbolic thought, huge mental capacity and rich inner landscape is unique in the biological world. But are there even higher levels of consciousness? Is the entire universe a conscious entity? Obviously I cannot answer such questions - particularly since I don't have a clear definition of what consciousness really is - but I think it might be interesting to explore it.

I believe that individual consciousness emerges when an individual has the ability to monitor its/his/her own thoughts. Mind and consciousness are holistic concepts and we cannot search for consciousness among individual brain cells. Trying to understand mind by analyzing individual brain cells is as futile as trying to understand how a human body functions, by analyzing its atomic constituents. Different levels of consciousness - and indeed higher levels - can arise when individual consciousnesses join forces. In nature, honey bees are an interesting example. Individual honeybees are capable of high levels of cognition - maybe even some kind of individual consciousness. Yet, when they are in a hive, they appear to lose their individuality and become embodied into the group in such a way that the entire hive becomes conscious. Somehow, the hive seems to take on a mind of its own. It becomes like a brain, with the individual bees analogous to neurons, signalling to each other using mechanisms that are not clearly understood. It has been noted that a single honey bee has a memory of six days and an average life span of 6 weeks, but an entire hive has a memory of three months.
Just as "hive consciousness" emerges from an interaction between individual conscious bees, so-called "herd behaviour" emerges in humans as a result of social interaction. We regularly see large groups of humans behaving as a single entity. We see it in a stock market crashes where there is frenzied selling of shares, and in a stock market bubble where everybody is greedily buying. It has been seen in cult followings such as with Beatlemania, Nazi Germany, religious cults and weird fashions (remember those ridiculous fashions of the 1970s?). Now, with the ever-growing popularity of the Internet, humans all around the world are linked more strongly than ever before. The Net is helping to bring cultures together into a kind of global village. There is faster and more efficient communication between scientists and students around the world. Just recently I wanted to find some particular information about Leonardo Da Vinci; I logged onto an appropriate chat group, asked the question, and was directed to the information I needed by a person who lives thousands of kilometres away from me. Of course, all these positive characteristics of the Internet are clouded by unpleasant aspects such as cyber-smut, cyber-con-artists and false information, but that's beside the point.

Humans seem to conform and do things just because everybody else is doing them; it appears that this behaviour is hardwired into our brains. Or maybe there is a force that compels us to group together. With this last comment, I do not wish to invoke God or any kind of metaphysics, but there does seem to be something in the universe that tends to bring us together.
In the 1940s, a researcher with the snappy name of George Zipf showed that population growths in cities around the world obey a "mathematical power law" as do the flickering lights of quasars, the occurrences of earthquakes and the economics of stock markets. To me, this is a staggering observation; we humans exercise our individual free wills when deciding on where to live, yet, as a whole, we are subject to the same laws as everything else in the universe. I believe that free will is nothing more than an illusion brought about by consciousness. Seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza once wrote in a letter, "If a falling stone were conscious, it would believe it was falling of its own free will."

The following is from the Bhagavad-Gita (3:27-28). Kirshna says:
"All actions are wrought in all cases by the qualities of Nature only. He whose mind is deluded by egoism thinks: 'I am the doer'.
But he who knows the truth, O mighty-armed Arjuna, about the divisions of the qualities and their functions, knowing that the Gunas as senses move amidst the Gunas as the sense-objects, is not attached."
In other words, it is the forces of the universe that work with their instruments - our bodies, our molecules.

Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal God so we would call him an atheist. However, he did speak of having a kind of religious experience which he called "the cosmic religious feeling":
"The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the subliminity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole."

We, as individuals and conscious beings, are just a part of a much bigger entity - the universe. We are part of the physical universe and are made of the stuff of the universe; we originated from the one source. The late astronomer Carl Sagan would say that we are "children of stardust". Is there some form of unified universal mind that transcends our normal human consciousness? A lot of people have felt themselves being lifted into a "higher state of consciousness"; this has been achieved through meditation, prayer and mind-altering drugs. Such experiences include feelings of oneness with the universe and freedom from everyday thoughts and anxieties. I've personally had such experiences a few years ago while meditating. Can such feelings be explained as just tricks of the mind, or can it be that true consciousness is masked by our brains' physical processes? I believe the latter and I believe that we are just one component of a conscious evolving universe. I mentioned earlier that consciousness arises when one is able to monitor one's own thoughts. In the case of humans (and other animals), having thoughts requires the possession of a brain - a kind of biological computer, but certainly not a digital computer. Is the universe (which includes us biological creatures) a kind of computer?
After the work of great men like Galileo and Newton, the image of the universe was that of a clockwork, initially set in motion by God's hand but now running, on its own, toward a predetermined outcome. However with the discovery, in the 20th century, of quantum mechanics and its statistical nature, it is no longer satisfactory to think of a deterministic clock. The universe can, in fact, be likened to a computer. The matter in the universe can be likened to computer hardware, and the laws of physics can be likened to the software. As the universe evolves dynamically in time, information is being processed. However, given the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the ultimate "output" of this cosmic computer is yet to be determined.
In fact, it has even been suggested that black holes "compute". This may come as a surprise to a lot of people since it had long been thought that any object that fell into a a black hole would be assimilated, and all information about that object would be lost forever; nothing escapes a black hole, so there may be input but no output. Then, in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes do indeed radiate, by using a quantum mechanism; they have an output. However, Hawking believed that this radiation was of a random nature. This is hardly an acceptable analogy of a computer, with information going in, and random garbage coming out. But current theory suggests that this radiation is not random at all; in fact, it is a processed version of any information that has fallen in; now, that's more like the behaviour of a computer.

The physicist Freeman Dyson once said that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of the universe. I think he just may be right and, if the universe is not infinite, humanity may one day be able to unlock its secrets.

The Book of Life

2007-06-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

"I know well, demon, that you have penetrated into the darkness of the past, and that you have read, by the light of what torch I know not, every page of my life ..." (quote from The count of Monte Cristo).

The time is coming when we will be able to read the genetic profile of a newborn baby as if we were perusing the pages of a book. Having this data means that we can obtain information about the types of diseases and disorders the baby is likely to suffer from in the future. Of course, having a gene for a particular disorder doesn't necessarily mean that you will end up suffering from that disorder; it only means that that the probabilities are increased (unless, for example, you have the gene for Huntington's chorea, which is a certain death sentence). The news came this week that genetic links have been found to diseases such as type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, bipolar disorder and heart disease. Read about it HERE:

My first reaction to this news was a positive one. Knowing that you have the genes that make you susceptible to lung cancer means that you can make some lifestyle choices, such as refraining from smoking, to reduce the probability of being afflicted. Knowing that you have the genetic susceptibility to colon cancer means that you know to avoid it by having a low-fat diet and having periodic medical tests.

But then I came the realisation that there are ethical dilemmas to be addressed, and these are uncharted waters. To whom should your own genetic information be disclosed? Should you yourself be privy to it? I know I would want to be, particularly if I have a predisposition to a serious ailment. But it's not as simple as that.
Should your potential marriage partner know your genetic profile? I suppose there would be cases where it is almost mandatory that your partner must know: what if I am a carrier of a recessive gene for a potentially fatal disease, and I wish to marry my childhood sweetheart, whom I love very much. The problem is that if she also happens to be a carrier, then it is likely that our offspring will be afflicted. In such a case, it makes sense for us to disclose our "DNA books" to each other, but what if our future progeny is likely to suffer from something more benign - like deafness, high blood pressure, sterility, low intelligence, etc.? Should I have children with the love of my life, knowing that our offspring are likely to suffer from Down's Syndrome, or should we instead adopt children? Not accepting a child that is less than perfect is equivalent to selective breeding of humanity; something like eugenics - the philosophy adopted by the Nazis. According to eugenicists, abortion was seen as a means of improving the human race and contribute to evolutionary progress of humanity. Of course, the Nazis were not the only ones to promote some form of selective breeding of humans. In 1994, Nature published an article titled "China's Misconception of Eugenics", which argued that the Chinese government's policy of trying to prohibit couples with certain diseases from procreating had a distasteful eugenic quality. In China, the law requires premarital examinations for serious genetic disorders, mental illness, and also for some infectious diseases such as venereal disease and hepatitis B. If the disorder is sufficiently "serious", tubal ligation or long-acting contraception is required for permission to marry. If childbearing is allowed, prenatal diagnosis and termination of affected foetuses are compulsory. As distasteful as all this may sound, there are other modern examples.
Haemophilia is a sex-linked genetic blood disorder, from which only males suffer. Females may carry the gene without being affected, and pass it on to their male offspring. So, a pregnant woman who knows that she carried the gene for haemophilia could find out the sex of the foetus and, perhaps, choose to have it aborted if it is male because she knows that there would be a 50% chance that she would give birth to a haemophiliac son. According to Australian ethicist Peter Singer, "these practices were widespread in many countries, and yet did not cause any great outcry". Today, we have techniques for definitely identifying haemophilia before birth but, again according to Peter Singer, "... the principle is the same: women are offered, and usually accept, abortions in order to avoid giving birth to a child with haemophilia". there are other conditions that can be detected before birth - Down's Syndrome is one - and, in future, more disorders will be added to the list.
Here is a question: A mother is expecting a baby. She knows it's a boy and she learns that his genetic profile indicates that he will be highly intelligent but he will also contract a crippling disease that will leave him wheel-chair bound for the rest of his life. What would you do if you were that mother? One such baby was born, and he grew up to be world renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. A person with such a disease can live a happy and productive life, but he could just as easily be destined for a miserable existence.

In years to come, the information written in the "genetic book of life" will come to be unravelled; what should be done with it? How should it be used? Who should be privy to your personal data; the government? Insurance companies? Employers? Potential spouses? Should I be allowed to decide who should know my genetic details? Where should we turn for answers to these kinds of questions?
Science? Science cannot provide ethical guidance, but it can provide scientific opinions and clarify technical issues so that judgements are made with the help of hard facts. However, in the wrong hands, science has been shown to be very dangerous. As we know, Darwinism was the inspiration for eugenics, which in turn inspired the racist policies of the Nazis. The following is a quote from Hans-Walther Schmuhl - a German expert on euthanasia debates before World War 1:

"By giving up the conception of the divine image of humans under the influence of the Darwinian theory, human life became a piece of property, which - in contrast to the idea of a natural right to life - could we weighed against other pieces of property."

And let's not forget other misuses of science, such as weapons of mass destruction.

So, should we look to religion for guidance? Religious organizations - particularly Christian and Islamic - are very powerful and are usually very heavy-handed in their responses when there are threats to their power; they can have input to the debate, but theirs is just one point of view. Morality and ethics are not the domain of religions. I happen to be an atheist yet I think that I have a strong sense of morality - I give generously to charities, I don't steal or kill and I don't covet my neighbour's ass - without needing a non-existent God as a role-model. Furthermore, the morals of many Christians leave a lot to be desired. The most powerful Christian in the world is George W Bush; he believes so strongly in the sanctity of human life that he opposes any form of embryonic or therapeutic stem cell research yet, as Governor of Texas, he presided over more executions (of human beings) than any other governor in the state's history, and he made the decision to go to war against Iraq - a decision that he does not regret and which has cost the lives of many thousands of precious humans. Looking back on human history, how much human blood has been shed in the name of fictitious Gods? So much for religion and its stance on the sanctity of human life.

The questions of what to do with individual genetic information are very difficult, and there are no right answers that would satisfy everybody, but they must be debated openly within our community.

Our Sick Society

2007-06-02T19:13:00.000-07:00

There exists a disease that has the potential to affect each and every one of us. The incidence of this disease has increased ten-fold during the last century, and it is rising unabated. It can come in varying degrees of intensity, and it can be deadly in 15 percent of cases. It seems to strike women more often than men. There are various types of treatments that can provide relief, but there is no cure. It can strike the average person, but it has also been known to strike the wealthy, the famous - even world leaders have been afflicted. According to the World Health Organization, it is the 4th leading cause of disease burden in the world. By 2030, it will probably become the second leading cause of disease burden. This is a silent and insidious epidemic, the likes of which has no precedence in human history; chances are that you know somebody who has been affected. The disease is clinical depression.

Clinical depression is very different from the sadness one experiences from time to time. To illustrate an extreme case, I have provided the following passage from the June 1998 edition of Scientific American; it's a quote from the memoir of American novelist William Styron:

"He [a psychiatrist] asked me if I was suicidal, and I reluctantly told him yes. I did not particularize--since there seemed no need to--did not tell him that in truth many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me. Death by heart attack seemed particularly inviting, absolving me as it would of active responsibility, and I had toyed with the idea of self-induced pneumonia--a long frigid, shirt-sleeved hike through the rainy woods. Nor had I overlooked an ostensible accident, a la Randall Jarrell, by walking in front of a truck on the highway nearby.... Such hideous fantasies, which cause well people to shudder, are to the deeply depressed mind what lascivious daydreams are to persons of robust sexuality."

If you are a depressed person, the world seems grey and remote. You feel that you are powerless. There is no point in washing or looking after your appearance, and no point in even getting out of bed in the morning. You take no pleasure in anything in life; sex, a pay rise, a party or a fine meal give you no joy. You feel imprisoned in a dark colourless inner world, and the exuberance and brightness of youth seems light years away.

Australia's Beyond Blue website lists the following behaviours associated with depression:

* moodiness that is out of character
* increased irritability and frustration
* finding it hard to take minor personal criticisms
* spending less time with friends and family
* loss of interest in food, sex, exercise or other pleasurable activities
* being awake throughout the night
* increased alcohol and drug use
* staying home from work or school
* increased physical health complaints like fatigue or pain
* being reckless or taking unnecessary risks (e.g. driving fast or dangerously)
* slowing down of thoughts and actions.

What's the cause of this disorder? Ask a group of average people this question, and there's a good chance that you'll hear the words "chemical imbalance in the brain" mentioned on more than one occasion. Some might even throw in the word "genetic". There has been a lot scientific research into depression. Brain imaging has shown that depressed people have underactivity in the side-section of the frontal cortex (the part of the brain concerned with generating actions) while the middle part (the part which generates conscious emotion) is overactive. This means that the depressed person is without drive or will to do anything, yet is fixated on their emotional state. Great! We have just used sophisticated brain imaging technology to help us to state the bleeding obvious. What else do we know?
The June 1998 edition of Scientific American talks about a disorder in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis - the system that manages the body's response to stress:

"When a threat to physical or psychological well-being is detected, the hypothalamus amplifies production of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), which induces the pituitary to secrete ACTH. ACTH then instructs the adrenal gland atop each kidney to release cortisol. Together all the changes prepare the body to fight or flee and cause it to shut down activities that would distract from self-protection. For instance, cortisol enhances the delivery of fuel to muscles. At the same time, CRF depresses the appetite for food and sex and heightens alertness. Chronic activation of the HPA axis, however, may lay the ground for illness and, it appears, for depression."
This can explain why persistent anxiety, stress and despair can lead to depression. SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are sometimes prescribed to people with depression, and they return CRF levels to normal.

There are other theories, and there is also the suggestion of a genetic cause - although no gene has yet been identified.

Brain imaging and other scientific research can give us a good picture of what is going on in a depressed person's brain, and it can lead to more effective treatments. But how do we explain the growing rate of people suffering from depression? Here's an interesting statistic from U.S psychologist Professor Martin Seligman: For a person born around World War 1, the lifetime prevalence of severe depression is 1%. For a person born around World War 2, the lifetime prevalence is 5%. However, if you were born in the 1960s or later, the lifetime prevalence of severe depression appears (so far) to be 10-15%. But wait, there's more: 2 generations ago, if you became depressed, your first bout was likely to be at around 35 years of age. Today, the mean age for the first instance of depression is 14.

Yes, a depressed person may have "chemical imbalances in the brain" and the disorder can be triggered by emotional trauma, and, yes, some people are genetically more susceptible to depression than others, but these figures cannot be explained by neurobiology or genetics. And I don't believe that they can be explained by factors such as air-pollution and nutrition; although it is suggested that diets low in B-complex vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids may contribute to the problem, I don't believe this is a major factor. My opinion is that modern society is the main contributor: a society that threatens to isolate and marginalise the individual.

In 1970, Philip Slater wrote in "The Pursuit of Loneliness" that Americans "seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business" Slater goes on to say that even within families there is a feeling that "each member should have a separate room, and even a separate telephone, television, and car when economically possible. We seek more and more privacy and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it."
Today, many of us (myself included) can say that we do not know many of our neighbours. We occasionally hear of elderly people who die alone in their homes, with their bodies lying undiscovered for months or even years. When a person goes on a shooting rampage, reporters interview the neighbours and ask what the killer was like. The answer is typically something like, "He was a very quiet person ... he pretty much kept to himself." Dear reader, I say that many of us are more alone than we might like to be. Even within the family, TV, DVDs, radio and Internet take up the majority of our evening hours, leaving less time for social and emotional talking; our children become like strangers in our homes.

Outside of work and home/family life, many people have nothing else. In the U.S sitcom "Cheers", the theme song says, " ... sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came ... ". Traditionally, all great civilizations had their informal gathering places: the piazzas of Italy, the pubs of Britain, the beer gardens of Germany etc. - places where people would gather, gossip, and talk freely. These days, just as the cinema and theatre have been usurped by TV and DVDs, people prefer to spend an evening at home to a night at the pub. There is also a lack of places for children to hang out in the suburbs. Meeting and chatting to real people has become more difficult; even on public transport: it is difficult to strike up a conversation with a fellow train-traveller when she is listening to her iPod or has her nose buried in a newspaper or is texting on her mobile phone.
In such a society where communications are reduced, it becomes easier for people to lose (or miss out on) the feelings of acceptance, the acknowledegements of their own worth.

Consumerism also has a lot to answer for. Today, we are working harder than ever: we have to pay for our children's private educations, plasma TVs, home renovations, gadgets, the latest cars, designer clothes, jewellery, beauty products, investment properties etc. and we are influenced by a media which sells us an illusion of ourselves in order to make profits. We are urged to borrow money to fund our expensive lifestyles; we are encouraged to mortgage our homes to buy investment properties with the goal of early retirement, but we find that as our income increases, so too does our spending. Somehow, the ugly word "debt" has been replaced by the respectable word "credit". In the old days, there was a certain stigma attached to debt; today, getting credit seems to be a mark of success. I recently received a letter from my bank with the good news that, as a valued customer, I am invited to apply for a "preferred loan" at a reduced interest rate. It came with the seductive sentence, "Now you don't have to wait for the things you want". The amount of debt owed by Australians is at a record high, but we can handle it because we are working harder than ever. However it leaves little time and energy to cultivate other interests and friendships.

Depression is an extreme mental state which comes from a sense of defeat maybe due to failure or loneliness or misfortune. When an emotion like despair becomes persistent - as can occur when a person is lacking a support-base, for example - it leads to the pathological state we know as clinical depression. It is a normal human reaction to adverse conditions. I believe that the reduction in human interaction is the real cause of the depression epidemic. It seems that we humans are not suited to the selfish society that we have created.

Big corporations are worried about the epidemic of depression because it affects an employee's efficiency and performance and, as a consequence, the company's bottom-line is adversely affected. But there are treatments - drugs that can alleviate some of the symptoms, but may give some undesirable side-effects - so that the economic machine can continue to function efficiently. However, the best cure is to avoid the disease in the first place. Reduce your chances of depression by spending less time at work and "getting out there" and being more social. Do volunteer work; if you like reading, join or start a book club; if you are religious, become more active in church activities; do a language course, or any kind of course; do ballroom dancing. The opportunities are limited only by your imagination. Blessed is the person who is satisfied with the simple things in life.

What kind of person will you grow up to be?

2007-05-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

A mother gazes lovingly at her newborn baby as he sleeps peacefully in his crib. Careful not to wake the infant, she gently whispers, "My son, what kind of life will you have? Will fortune smile on you or will you be dogged by bad luck? Will you enjoy good health or will you be sickly? Will you be happy or will you be miserable? Will you be liked or will you be hated? Will you live in times of peace or will you know the horrors of war? Will you be a law-abiding citizen or will you be a criminal? Will you find true love or will you be forever lonely? What kind of person will you grow up to be?"

This week I was taken aback by a small article in the newspaper which told of an old high-school classmate of mine (I'll call him Jim). Jim was recently sentenced to almost a year in prison for his dealings with the Melbourne underworld. I remember Jim as being a loud, boisterous kid who loved his football and who gave a lot of backchat to the teachers. Though he was well known as a tough guy, he was never a bully; he was the class clown who thrived on breaking all the rules. I haven't seen him in over 25 years but, over the years, I had occasionally heard rumours that he had become a wealthy businessman after he took the reins of his father's business. In my mind I pictured him driving a sports car, chomping on a fat cigar, and maybe laughing occasionally at the memory of all the teachers who thought he was no good, and ridiculing his nerdy classmates who got high marks. But it gives me no pleasure at all to know that he is now languishing in jail - his life in ruins. I hope he can bounce back.
At school, Jim and I didn't associate with each other; he was the confident loudmouth and I was the shy timid nerd-type. What determines these differences in temperament? What determines the kind of adult we are destined to become? Is it genetic or is it upbringing ... or is it a combination? How influential is our family upbringing? Is there any truth in the Jesuit saying, "Give me the child for the first seven years, and I'll give you the man"?
In the book "The Blank Slate", Steven Pinker lists the "3 laws of behavioural genetics":

* First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
* Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effects of the genes.
* Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Let's examine each of these laws:

First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
By "traits" we mean things like general intelligence, proficiency in language, maths ..., shyness, conscientiousness, dependence on cigarettes or alcohol or gambling, antagonism, confidence, sports talent ... etc.
We know that identical twins share all their genes. It has been shown that identical twins reared together are more similar than fraternal twins reared together. We know that biological siblings are more similar than adoptive siblings. We know that identical twins reared apart (in different families) are very similar. Pinker does not suggest that the effect of genes is certain; even if a child is genetically suited to being a champion sprinter, he will not realise his potential if he never run and never trains. An analogy is the relationship between temperature and snow. There is a likelihood of snow at temperatures below 0 degrees Celsius, but it doesn't always snow at those temperatures. However, it never snows when the temperature is 20 degrees Celsius. It's the same with genes; as far as things like temperament and sports ability are concerned, environmental factors have an influence, but genes provide a bias. Genes affect the probability that the child will acquire a particular trait.

So does this mean that out children's destinies are shaped by a combination of genes and their family upbringing? This takes us to the second law - by far the most controversial (in fact, Pinker spends a few pages defending this law).

Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effects of the genes.
Pinker distinguishes between the two types of environment : the shared environment and the unique environment. The shared environment is what affects us and our siblings: that is, our parents, our home life and our neighbourhood. The unique environment is everything else - anything that affects one sibling but not the other - for example: parental favoritism, different experiences, accidents, illnesses, friends.
Experiments with identical twins have shown that the effects of shared environments are small - often statistically insignificant. It has been shown that siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings separated at birth and adopted siblings are no more similar than strangers. But this second law is weakened by the following caveat that Pinker provides:

"The studies exclude cases of criminal neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and abandonment in a bleak orphanage, so they do not show that extreme cases fail to leave scars. Nor can they say anything about differences in cultures - about what makes a child a middle-class American as opposed to a Yanomamo warrior or a Tibetan monk or even a member of an urban street gang. In general, if a sample comes from a restricted range of homes, it may underestimate effects of homes across a wider range."

The studies were made on middle-class families which, as Pinker points out, embraces a wide range of lifestyles.

The third law is much less controversial - in fact, it makes perfect sense.

Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
It means that identical twins reared together - who share both their genes and a family environment - are not identical in their personalities. This must obviously be due to their respective unique environments. Even in the womb, identical twins may be subjected to slightly different conditions.

Pinker summarizes the three laws as follows: Genes 40-50 percent, shared environment 0-10 percent, and unique environment 50 percent.

The second law is the most problematic because it implies that parents do not matter, but this is not the intention at all. Pinker says:

"Parents can certainly harm their children by abusing or neglecting them. Children appear to need some kind of nurturing figure in their early years, though it needn't be a parent ... Parents select an environment for their children and thereby select a peer group. They provide their children with skills and knowledge, such as reading and playing a musical instrument. And they certainly affect their children's behaviour at home, just as powerful people can affect behaviour within their fiefdom. But parents' behaviour does not seem to shape their children's intelligence or personality over the long term." (italics are mine).

Going back to my fictitious scenario at the beginning of this post where the mother asks, "What kind of person will you grow up to be?"; the answer is fate. Children are not lumps of clay for parents to mold - in fact, a child's attitude can also affect the way the parent treats her.
But parenting is an important, satisfying and ethical responsibility, and it goes without saying that it is not right to mistreat one's children. One of Pinker's closing comments on this topic:

"There are well-functioning adults who still shake with rage when recounting the cruelties their parents inflicted on them as children. there are others who moisten up in private moments when recalling a kindness or sacrifice made for their happiness, perhaps one that the mother or father has long forgotten. If for no other reason, parents should treat their children well to allow them to grow up with such memories."

Tragedy of a Real War Hero

2007-05-19T19:35:00.000-07:00

He was born in London on 23rd June 1912. His was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, and his contribution to the war effort during the second world war was greater than those of Churchill or Eisenhower, but instead of being knighted and feted, his post-war life was one of humiliation and torment, and so unbearable that suicide ultimately seemed the best option for him. His name was Alan Turing. He was a shy man with a severe stutter, and he became a brilliant mathematician. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, his main claim to fame was his pioneering work which led to the concept of the modern computer.

In the 1930s, he worked at Cambridge University where, in 1937, he wrote a paper called "On Computable Numbers". In this paper he described a hypothetical machine that could perform a calculation by running through a prescribed sequence of steps fed via a paper tape. In other words, a calculation could be done by running an algorithm or program. He imagined a machine whose function could be altered to perform any conceivable operation simply by inserting the appropriate tape. Turing called this hypothetical machine a "Universal Turing Machine" and every modern computer in existence uses this principle. Along with John von Neumann, Turing could be considered a founding father of the modern computer.

However, Turing's life was about to take an abrupt turn. In 1939, Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, and Turing's academic career came to a sudden end when the British government invited him to become a cryptanalyst - a code breaker - at Betchley. He became the main intellect in the team that cracked the German Enigma codes. The Enigma provided the Nazis with secure communications, which was pivotal to Hitler's blitzkrieg strategy. The blitzkriegs (lightning war) were quick and co-ordinated attacks that required secure communications between large tank divisions, infantry and air force. Breaking the Enigma code meant that Allied generals were privy to the details of German plans, and was vital to the defeat of the Nazi war machine.

After the war, Turing eventually returned to academia, working on computer technology. But his life was to take a very dramatic turn. On 3rd February 1952, Turing was arrested for having a homosexual relationship with a nineteen year old unemployed Manchester man named Arnold Murray. The affair between the 2 men was private and it hurt nobody, but Turing was charged with the crime of "Gross Indecency Contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885". Under Section 11, it was illegal to commit any homosexual act - private or otherwise. Incredibly, private homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain up until 1967.

Turing was found guilty and was given the choice of either a 2 year prison sentence or spending a year taking "organotherapy". He chose the latter (what kind of experience would he have had as a homosexual in prison) and it meant that he had to take estrogen which made him impotent and caused him to develop breasts. It was basically chemical castration and it was supposed to "cure" him of his homosexuality. If that wasn't enough of a cure, he was also required to see a psychoanalyst. In 1953 his probation was ended. On 7th June 1954, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

So ended the life of a war hero and a brilliant mind - at the age of just 42. What other great things would he have achieved for humanity had he lived a normal lifespan?

The kind of "morality-gone-mad" to which Turing was subjected is reminiscent of the Taliban, but even in the West today, such attitudes persist. U.S morals campaigner and Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell - one of the most influential men in the U.S - contributed the following pearl of wisdom:

AIDS is not God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

I heard the news that Falwell died this week; I'm not gay but my first reaction was "good-riddance". He was a powerful man who was instrumental in getting George W Bush into the White House; a fundamentalist Christian who made insulting public comments against gays, abortionists, Jews, feminists and labour unions. Here's what he said after the September 11 attacks in 2001:

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'."

Falwell is dead but there are plenty of people in the world who share his ideals and there is no shortage of people willing to step into his shoes. A real tragedy is that Alan Turing was a victim of human ignorance fueled by blind and irrational religions. Unspeakable acts have been committed in the name of Christ, but Jesus would never have condoned what happened to Turing, and he would have no respect for people like Falwell and Bush.

Evidence of Dark Matter Found

2007-05-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me". -- Isaac Newton

This week it was announced that a group of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University have located what appears to be a ring of dark matter in the galaxy structure ZwC10024+1652 (also known by its nickname C10024+17) which is located 5 billion light years away from our solar system. They used the Hubble Space Telescope to make this discovery. Read about it HERE.

Dark matter is that mysterious substance that allegedly makes up 90% of our universe. In the 1930s, the eccentric Swiss astronomer Franz Zwicky found evidence of dark matter by using the Doppler shift to measure velocities of individual galaxies in the "Coma Cluster" (they just don't name galaxy clusters like they used to). Zwicky discovered that the galaxies were moving too rapidly relative to one another, to be held together only by the gravitational pull of all the stars in the cluster; the galaxies should have come apart and gone their own ways. He discovered the same thing in other clusters. He concluded that some unseen matter - and plenty of it - must be holding the clusters together: dark matter.
All the ordinary matter that we are familiar with (usually called baryonic matter) - stuff like trees, rocks, people, stars, galaxies, air, water etc. - is made of protons, neutrons and electrons. We know nothing about what constitutes dark matter - or non-baryonic matter.
If dark matter can't be seen and cannot interact with baryonic matter, how can we ever hope to detect it? Well, dark matter does interact with normal matter via gravity. Astronomers have been using a technique called "gravitational lensing" to get clues about the nature of dark matter, and here's how it works:
Suppose that the Earth, a massive galaxy and a background light source - say, a galaxy or a quasar - are in almost perfect alignment, as seen in the following diagram.

Since the space around the massive galaxy is warped, light is bent around it as it travels towards to the Earth and we end up seeing 2 images of the distant quasar. In this case, the massive galaxy acts as a gravitational lens. The following diagram shows what I mean by warping of space; it shows space as a 2 dimensional sheet, warped by mass.

If the Earth, the gravitational lens and the distant light source are not in perfect alignment, the second image received would be too faint to be visible, but we would get a distorted image of the distant light source - be it a galaxy or a quasar.

In the case were the gravitational lens is a cluster of galaxies (galaxies usually congregate in clusters), we may see multiple distorted images of the same distant galaxy which may lie billions of light-years beyond the cluster. The following following is a picture of ZwC10024+1652, which allegedly shows a ring of dark matter.

What we see in this picture are many galaxies, which are orange/tan in colour. Also, around the centre of the cluster, we can see some unusual blue-coloured galaxy shapes. these are multiple images of a distant galaxy. This unfortunately-named galaxy cluster is acting as a gravitational lens. The existence of the dark matter ring is indicated by the weak distortions of the many distant galaxies all over the image. Using computer modelling, the distorted light was mapped, in order to find out how the dark matter is distributed in the cluster, and the dark matter ring was detected. I'd really love to know how the astronomers managed to detect it. The computer-modelled dark matter ring is superimposed on the image in blue. The astronomers hypothesize that the dark matter ring, which is a mind-boggling 2.6 million light-years across - was formed 1-2 billion years ago when 2 galaxy clusters collided.

Why do we need to know the nature of dark matter? Well, according to Einstein's general relativity equations, the universe will either continue to expand forever (the universe will reach near absolute zero) or will contract into a fiery collapse - the so called "Big Crunch". Until we resolve the question of this dark matter, we cannot resolve the question of the ultimate fate of the universe. And besides, knowing the nature of this material can give us new perspectives about the origins of our universe and our place in it.

What could this non-baryonic matter be? A number of candidates have been proposed; some hypothetical particles with cool names like axions, gluinos, gravitinos, sneutrinos, magnetic monopoles, mirror matter, cosmic strings, and WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles). It has been proposed that dark matter may be something banal such as faint low mass stars that are undetectable by astronomers (baryonic but undetectable), but current research seems to suggest that it must be non-baryonic. Other candidates are MACHOs - Massive Compact Halo Objects- such as black holes, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars. MACHOs can be detected only by gravitational effects, so we cannot determine what type of matter forms a MACHO. MACHOs may even be composed of baryonic matter. Maybe dark matter is made up of a number of different types of matter. It has even been suggested that Newton's law of gravity may need modification which may explain some of the alleged evidence for dark matter ... although this could be difficult to prove since normal matter and dark matter seem to be mixed together.

It is very humbling to think that much of the matter that makes up the universe is totally unrelated to the matter that we are made of. Just think: over 90% of everything in the universe has never been seen ... all we can see is just the tip of the iceberg. Nearing the end of his life, Isaac Newton is said to have remarked,

"I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".

Whatever this dark matter is, now is a great time to be an astrophysicist; what, with this great ocean of mysterious matter out there waiting to be discovered.

The Madness of Love

2007-05-11T20:24:00.000-07:00

Spending your life and raising children with somebody is the most important commitment you will ever make. Such an undertaking carries the most sincerity if you are unable to back out; in other words, the promise becomes persuasive when you "fall in love". You cannot decide on the person with whom you'll fall in love by, say, having a checklist of desirable characteristics (although chances are that you and your partner will both have compatible characteristics); instead, it might be a laugh, a smile or a certain personality trait that will initially capture your heart. It wasn't for nothing that Elvis Presley sang the lyrics, "... I can't help falling in love with you". Indeed it has been said that those who are sensible about love are incapable of it. Think about it: how many people really know their partners when they fall in love with them?

Being in a state of passionate love usually does not last for more than a couple of years, and this is certainly not long enough to raise a child. But this passionate romantic love is only the first stage in the process of human sexual relationship, and its purpose is to focus all of one's courtship energy on a single person, to the exclusion of anybody else. The next stage involves a feeling of friendship, mutual respect and sexual commitment.
So, what happens to us when we fall in love? We've all heard those song lyrics which tell us that when you're in love, "you walk in a dream but you know you're not dreaming", or you're "walking on sunshine". From a cold scientific point of view, the euphoric feelings associated with the early stages of love are thought to be caused in the brain by a combination of dopamine and a chemical called phenylethylamine, working on the reward pathways from the limbic system (the unconscious part of the brain) to the cerebral cortex (the conscious part of the brain).
Human sexual bonding seems to be partly caused by the effects on the brain of a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus and also in the gonads (ovaries and testes); it is released as a result of sexual stimulation. During an orgasm, the brain is literally bathed in oxytocin and it produces that warm loving feeling that is conducive to pair bonding and the laying down (so to speak) of pleasant memories; the feeling of closeness after having sex with a beloved, is most probably due to oxytocin. Oxytocin is a lot like an addictive drug; couples affected by this hormone are blinded by love: they become oblivious to their partners' faults and they see life through rose-coloured glasses. On the flipside, a person may feel very uncomfortable and agitated when separated from the one he/she loves ... this could well be due to a need for an oxytocin "fix". Romantic love can therefore be likened to a drug-induced lunacy where reality (whatever that is) is distorted.

We often describe romantic love as an emotion but, in fact, it's a motivational state of mind which has the aim of making us pursue a preferred partner ... just as hunger is a motivational state of mind "designed" to make us pursue sustenance.

So, even though we are usually attracted to compatible partners, romantic love is a kind of chemically-instigated self-delusion; is this really a good mechanism for building relationships? Well, what's the alternative? If all sexual relationships were founded on "rational" decisions - e.g. having a shopping list of suitable qualities and characteristics of a potential partner - then what would happen if an even more suitable potential mate moved in next door? Nature has bestowed romantic love upon humanity - a state of mind that we do not decide to have and is not triggered by objective decision-making; a state of mind that compels us to "follow our beloved to the end of the earth". However, just as there are plenty of love songs that proclaim how wonderful love can be, there are just as many songs that reveal the pain and heart-break that results when love doesn't work out ... this is the other side of the coin.

Spurned lovers have been known to display obsessive behaviour, rage, paranoia and depression. A rejected lover can endure some of the most deeply-felt emotional pain possible. When lovers first get rejected, they may enter a "protest phase" where they devote all their energy to trying to win back their partner's affections; they become obsessed with their primary goal of rekindling the relationship. They may resort to emails, phone calls, humiliating visits to the ex-lover's home and workplace, and stalking. Under these circumstances, the brain keeps producing excess dopamine as if an expected reward is delayed in coming. High levels of dopamine are associated with high motivation in attaining goals, but is also linked to anxiety. At this stage, the thwarted lover's stress system springs into action, due to a separation anxiety. The hypothalamus secretes a hormone called CRH, which is the first trigger to the release of cortisol - the stress hormone. This stress causes the production of even more dopamine in the brain. We thus get the situation whereby, the more a rejected lover's efforts are frustrated, the higher his/her dopamine levels rise, prompting the disappointed lover to try even harder.
Dumped lovers may also experience anger - even if the separation wasn't a particularly nasty one. This becomes understandable as the goal of reconciliation starts to appear unattainable, and the situation becomes frustrating.
Eventually, the disappointed lover comes to the realisation that it is really all over, and gives up. Many sink into depression, some turn to drink, some even resort to more drastic measures, like suicide.
Of course, not everybody reacts to romantic rejection in the same way. Some have the ability to overcome romantic setbacks relatively easy.
If you believe that romantic love is akin to a chemically-induced madness, you may begin to understand the cases of unrequited love in literature: Don Quixote and Dulcinea, Dante Alighieri and Beatrice Portinari, and Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther". You may also understand (but not condone) to some extent the behaviour of stalkers. Even the most intelligent and well-adjusted people can succumb to the madness of love, and behave in the most bizarre ways. Just look at the case of Lisa Nowak - a NASA astronaut and robotics expert, no less. She is awaiting trial for her crime of passion: read all about her HERE. Nowak's is not a happy ending but it seems to me that when it comes to love in the 21st century, "happily ever after" is the exception to the rule ... but let's do it anyway.

The Catholic Church

2007-05-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, a good friend of mine in Italy alerted me to a news story that made the front pages of newspapers all over Italy. For those who read Italian, you can READ IT HERE.

At an annual televised May Day rock concert held in front of the Saint John in Lateran basilica in Rome, an Italian comedian, Andrea Rivera, spoke out against the Pope's stand on various issues. Among other things, he criticized the Church for denying a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralysed with muscular dystrophy (he died in December after a doctor agreed to switch off his life-support system). The Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, promptly accused Rivera of - believe it or not - terrorism. In its editorial, L'Osservatore Romano said that a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert had launched "vile attacks" on the Pope in front of an "excitable crowd". Extraordinarily, the editorial went on to say, "This too is terrorism. It is terrorism to launch attacks on the Church. It is terrorism to fuel blind and irrational rage against he (the Pope) who always speaks in the name of love - love for life and love for man." Italy's labour unions, who organized the concert, have distanced themselves from Rivera's comments.

In recent times, there has been an atmosphere of growing anti-clericalism in Italy, including graffiti and comments in blogs. Indeed, Rivera's performance came comes only a few days after Archbishop Bagnasco received a bullet in the post after allegedly making comments comparing homosexuality to incest and paedophilia.

The Vatican's response to Rivera's comments is breathtakingly heavy-handed. Why can't there be criticism of the Church? After all, we can criticise our political leaders, so why can't we disagree with the views of our religious leaders ... they are not infallible.

The Roman Catholic Church in particular has a long history of being inflexible, power-hungry, heavy-handed and corrupt.
As far as being heavy-handed is concerned, we all know about the Inquisition and the burning of heretics at the stake. Saint Thomas wrote in Summa Theologica (II, xi): "... much more may heretics, from the moment that they are convicted, be not only excommunicated, but slain justly out of hand." By the end of the sixteenth century, hundreds of thousands of people had been savagely tortured and burned alive ... just because they held opinions contrary to the Church (L'Osservatore Romano, had it existed in those days, would have called them "terrorists"). The twisted logic of the Church was that killing a heretic does even the heretic a favour, since it will prevent him/her from committing further sins and thereby decreasing his/her punishment in hell. It has to be said that Protestants were just as intolerant.

The Catholic Church has also shown itself to be corrupt. They have used the fear of eternal damnation to control the masses and to extract large amounts of money from the gullible. During the medieval era, the ideas of horrible punishment in the afterlife became very real fears to all Christians. Pope Leo X (son of Lorenzo "the Maginificent" de' Medici) exploited this fear by persuading the faithful to pay for scrolls of paper called "indulgences", which reduced the agonies of Purgatory, through which all souls must pass in order for their sins to be "purged" so that they could enter the pearly gates of heaven. The sale of indulgences - along with other practices - went towards supporting a huge Church hierarchy and all its extravagances. These practices spurred a young German priest named Martin Luther to take action: on 31st October 1517, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church 95 theses demanding reform to the church. Even as recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was able to specify the number of days' remission from Purgatory that each rank in the church hierarchy was able to grant (for example, cardinals could grant 200 days).

The Roman Catholic church has a history of defensiveness in the face of rational thought. Science has always been a threat to the Church, and there are numerous example in history that show how the Catholic Church has sought to suppress (by whatever means) any scientific or philosophical thought that went against Church doctrine.
Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Scholar proposed that there is an infinite number of worlds, and that many are inhabited. For this, he was burned at the stake in 1600, and became a "martyr of science". The charges against Bruno were as follows:
* Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity.
* Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
* Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation
* Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
* Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass
* Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
* Dealing in magics and divination.
* Denying the Virginity of Mary.

In 1543, a Polish Catholic cleric named Nicholas Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the centre of the universe; the Earth was just one of the planets. In 1616, the Catholic Church placed Copernicus's work on its list of forbidden books, where it remained for over 200 years (1835).

Of course, we can't forget Galileo Galilei. Galileo enraged Pope Urban VIII (formerly Maffeo Barberini, Galileo's friend) when he wrote his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems", in which he supported Copernicus's view of the universe. An elderly Galileo was summoned to Rome and was made to solemnly swear that he denounced his view that the Earth moves around the Sun (it is said that Galileo could not help muttering under his breath, "e pure si muove" - and yet it moves). He was sentenced to life-imprisonment, but on account of his age, the sentence was commuted to house arrest (what would his sentence have been had he not been a friend of Pope Urban VIII?). It took the Vatican 350 years - yes, 350 years - to finally concede that "errors were made" in this case.

Would Jesus have been a good Catholic? Jesus was remarkably willing to forgive sinners and openly associate with them. This did not make him popular with the authorities of the day, and it would not make him popular with the Catholic Church . The Roman Catholic Church was founded in Jesus' memory, yet his teachings on the subject of sin have not been seen in the Roman Catholic Church throughout its history (although, to be fair, individual priests would certainly get Christ's approval). Jesus would probably be branded a terrorist by today's "L'Osservatore Romano".

Today, the Roman Catholic Church holds views that are antiquated and offensive to many members of the community. Its views on homosexuality, its refusal to allow priests to marry, its refusal to allow female priests to be ordained, and its concealment of paedophile priests are examples of the irrelevance of the Church. Its views on contraception are just ridiculous; to this day the Catholic Church points to the sin of Onan (Genesis 38:9) as a good reason to prohibit contraception - thus showing itself to be ridiculous and immature. These kinds of views have drawn resentment from the faithful. In 2007, we have no reason to fear an Inquisition, and we are free to make our views heard (peacefully, of course). Thanks to the progress of science and rational thought, we know that the Earth is not the centre of the universe and that religions are fallible. The Pope does not believe in evolution, but his Church - that mighty global empire - must evolve if it is to retain any relevance whatsoever.

Is the end nigh for males?

2007-04-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

There is a recent report of a new stem-cell study from the University of Gottingen in Germany where stem cells taken from men's bone marrow have been redirected to resemble immature sperm cells. The next step, of course, is to create mature sperm cells in the laboratory, without the need for testicles. Professor Karim Nayernia led the study and he has previously managed to grow sperm cells from mouse bone marrow and used them to fertilize mouse ova and create living baby mice. All this is good news for infertile men - in fact, the purpose of these studies is to help infertile couples to conceive. But this news has also been seized by the sensationalist world media, and it has been speculated that, in the future, men may become superfluous as sperm will be produced from female bone marrow stem cells.

Imagine: no more men in the world ... some might say it would be a utopia. It conjures up images similar to that depicted by the 1915 story "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story can be found in its entirety HERE. Herland is about a secluded civilization that is populated only by women (all men had been killed long ago by a series of wars and natural disasters). The inhabitants of Herland use a technique called "parthenogenisis" (which is never explained in detail) to procreate. In this story, Gilman shows that our society is unfair to women and does not allow them to achieve their full potential. The women of Herland are strong, self-confident, self-reliant and very intelligent; their society is peaceful, orderly and crime-free. Herland is basically a giant family pursuing the common good. Accoerding to Ms. Gilman, this kind of utopia is possible when men are eliminated.

Herland is fiction, and we humans still do not have any way to procreate without sex, but we do have the technology today to predetermine the sex of our progeny - although we still need males to make it possible. In dairy farms around the world, cows are much more desirable than bulls; in fact, bulls are a liability and eat into the dairy farmer's profits. However, a technique called "flow cytometry" or "Fluorescent-activated cell sorting" (FACS) is used to separate bulls' female-producing sperm from male-producing sperm. Bull sperm are marked with special dyes that bind to the X or the Y chromosome. The cells are then passed through a FACS machine where the X and Y bearers are separated. The Y bearers are discarded and cows are impregnated with X bearing sperm, thus guaranteeing that a cow will be born. A company in Virginia called Microsort provides the same service to human couples. This process still requires input from men ... so, if Professor Nayernia's research bears no fruit, maybe a super race of feral women could take over the world and enslave only the small group of men needed for the purpose of creating a global sperm bank (all other men would be exterminated).

Would it be desirable for us to engineer an all-woman world where people breed without the benefits (not to mention the pleasure) of sex? Why do we need sex anyway?
By whatever means, Nature has bestowed this very sophisticated system of sex upon us. Men and women have different and complementary characteristics and behaviours ... why would Nature provide such a system and "infrastructure" if it were not of vital importance to our survival? Well, biologically speaking, sex allows species to acquire new characteristics by exchanging genes. Eventually a mutant gene will be exchanged which may confer a new and beneficial characteristic - e.g. resistance to a particular contagion. We need sex in order to evolve and survive - just as all other species, including bacteria and viruses, are constantly mutating. And men are vital to the process. Genetically speaking, men bring women together; they make genetic links between families and allow genes to be tested against nature in new and perhaps beneficial coalitions; sperm are used to move foreign DNA into eggs. We can think of males as conduits through which genetic information passes between females. Without males, all new mutations would be restricted to the direct descendants of the female in which they originate, and humanity would become a multitude of clones. Humanity would certainly become less efficient in its fight for survival. The end of the "male race" is still a long way away.
Scientific arguments notwithstanding, few would disagree that women in general would not like to see a world without men ... we men are such lovable creatures.

The Mind's Eye

2007-04-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

I work with a few blind people, and am always amazed at the speed in which they read Braille with their fingertips. I'm even more amazed at the way they can identify the contents of tactile diagrams - particularly when they have been blind since birth. Tactile diagrams are images that use raised surfaces so that blind and visually impaired people can feel them. These diagrams can be maps, graphs, pictures of human body parts ... anything you can think of. I've spoken to people who have produced such diagrams (and, indeed, I've produced one or two myself), and I regularly hear comments from them such as: "I don't believe the client will get anything out of this drawing" - particularly when the diagram is quite complicated. Personally, I always thought that for a blind person to make any sense of a tactile diagram, he or she must have had some sight in the past; surely a person who has been blind since birth, and has never seen a face, would make no sense of a diagram of a face in profile. I decided to do a little research.

I found a recent article in "Scientific American" - "How the Blind Draw", by John M. Kennedy (vol. 16 Number 3, November 2006). In this article, a number of experiments are described.
In Stockholm in 1993, 9 adults were tested - 3 men and 6 women. 4 were congenitally blind, 3 had lost their sight after the age of 3, and 2 had minimal vision. Each subject was asked to examine 4 tactile diagrams of line drawings of facial profiles; each diagram had a distinctive feature: one had a large nose, one had a big smile, one had curly hair and one had a beard. The subjects were asked to describe the most prominent feature on each display (smile, hair, beard, nose). Five of them - including one man who had been blind since birth - correctly identified all 4, and only 1 of the subjects identified none. On average, the group identified 2.8 out of 4. In comparison, when 18 sighted people were blindfolded and given the same test, they scored only slightly better, matching an average of 3.1 out of 4.

In another experiment - this time in Japan in 1993 - a study was made where early-blind subjects were asked to recognise raised-line outline pictures of common objects such as fish or a bottle. An average of 60 percent of the pictures were recognised correctly (sighted blindfolded subjects did a lot better, but only because they were generally more familiar with pictures.

Clearly, the ability to understand tactile diagrams varies significantly among blind people, but it is nevertheless incredible that people who have been blind since birth are able to recognise images in tactile drawings. Even more amazing is that blind people are able to draw pictures! The Scientific American article gives cases such as that of Betty who lost all her sight at the age of 2, yet is able to draw pictures that are easily recognised by sighted people: "Relying on her imagination and sense of touch, Betty enjoyed tracing out the distinctive shape of an individual’s face on paper." Are sight and touch somehow linked in the brain?

In a paper published in the science journal Nature in 1996 )"Activation of the Primary Visual Cortex by Braille Reading in Blind Subjects", Nature, 380:526-528 by Sadato et al.), PET brain scans were done on Braille readers to find out what happened in the visual cortex (the visual cortex is the part of the brain that makes sense of information coming into our eyes). The subjects of this study included people with normal vision and people who were blind (either congenitally or from a infancy).
In the first experiment, the subjects were scanned under two scenarios. In one scenario, the subjects were simply required to sweep their fingers back and forth over a rough surface covered with dots. In the second scenario they were given tactile discrimination tasks such as deciding whether 2 grooves in the surface were the same or different. Using PET scanning, blood flow in the visual cortex was monitored during each task, and compared to a rest condition when the subjects were scanned while keeping their hands still. For the sighted subjects, there was a significant drop in blood flow in the visual cortex during the tactile discrimination tasks (they were blindfolded). In contrast, the blind subjects experienced an increase in blood flow, but only during the discrimination tasks and not when they aimlessly swept their fingers over the surface.
The second experiment involved reading Braille. The blind subjects read strings of eight Braille symbols and had to decide whether the strings formed a word or a non-word. Again, as in the first experiment, the blood flow increased in the visual cortex during the Braille reading.
It is still unclear how tactile information activates visual cortex neurons in blind people. Louis Braille invented the tactile reading system because he believed that vision loss was offset by heightened sensitivity in the fingertips. It makes sense to think that since the visual cortex is not used by the eyes, it is commandeered by our sense of touch ... it would be a shame if nature allowed this "real estate" to simply go unused. I like to think of it in a different way: seeing is not something that we do only with our eyes. Seeing is only possible when you know what you are going to see, and it is the visual cortex's job to create the expectations for what we are about to see. In blind people, the "expectation" part of seeing is operational but there is no data coming in from the eyes ... but input can come from other senses. It is possible for our mind to arrive at the same mental picture of an object via senses other than sight - for example, touch - and, indeed, "seeing" also involves touching, but sighted people are unaware of it because the input from he eyes is so overwhelming.
Each of us has a "mind's eye".

Smog

2007-04-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently returned home after a 2 week work-assignment in Beijing. I've always thought about visiting China, with images of the Great Wall, the countryside, and the friendly Chinese people. But my friend painted a much less inviting picture of Beijing. He complained of the heavy smog and air pollution. Sure, the industries that create this smog, fuelled by workers working 12 hour days, have turned China into an economic powerhouse, but at what cost to the environment and to humanity?
I recently read a short story written in 1958 by Italo Calvino called "Smog"; the original Italian title is "La Nuvola di Smog", and it deals with (you guessed it) smog. I'd like to write a little about this remarkable short story.

The main character is a journalist - the narrator of the story, whose name is never disclosed to the reader. He arrives in a big city (the name of which we are never told), and rents a room from a deaf elderly lady. The city is covered by a big cloud of smog which really makes its presence felt; there is dust everywhere. He is hired by a magazine called Purification in its editorial department. Purification is the organ of an institute which aims to fight air-pollution in the city. The Editor-in-Chief of Purification is Mr. Cordà, who also happens to be the president of a corporation which is responsible for most of the city's air-pollution. The press-officer at Purification is Mr. Avandero. Occasionally, the narrator receives phone calls from his girlfriend Claudia - a beautiful and successful woman who lives in another city, and who visits the narrator. The narrator also makes the acquaintance of a young worker and unionist named Omar Basaluzzi, who organises meetings against the smog problem.

Each of the main characters in the story reacts differently to the air-pollution: Mr. Cordà pretends to fight the problem, but in reality he's the biggest contributor. In fact, he is almost proud of the city's smog. Cordà says: "We are a great foggy industrial city, you realise; therefore smog exists here, too, we have no less smog than anywhere else. ... We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation! At the same time, you understand?" The narrator comments about Cordà: "... Everything that was, for me, the substance of a general wretchedness, for men like him was surely the sign of wealth, supremacy and power ...".
The beautiful Claudia chooses to ignore the problem; she sees the world through rose coloured glasses. There is the unionist Omar Basaluzzi, who dreams of a world with ideologies completely different from those of Western societies. And there is the office manager at the magazine (Mr. Avandero), who washes his hands of the whole thing and goes on vacation whenever he can: "What's the city for, then, except to get out on a Saturday and Sunday".

At one point in the story, a new problem becomes evident, which threatens to overshadow the problem of the smog. No, it's not the threat of global terrorism and Al Qaeda - the story was written in 1958. The new threat is air pollution due to radiation. The problem of smog is reduced to a mere trifle compared to the nuclear threat of world destruction.

In the closing stages of the story, we find our main character in the countryside - in a place where linen from the city is taken to be washed and hung to dry. He looks around at his surroundings - the green meadows, the colours, the clean air, the merry laughter and the water in the stream flowing with bluish bubbles - and then he turns back and heads towards the city. There is no moralistic message - just a suggestion that there is a way forward: to face the problems of the city but with a heart warmed by the images of the countryside. In a way, the ending is a mixture of hope - as the narrator witnesses the countryside - and despair at the thought of a world which cannot be saved. Hope or despair? It's up to us to act and to decide how it ends.

Darwin's Universe

2007-04-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

Recently I was sitting at St. Kilda Beach with a few friends and we got to talking about the upcoming Easter holidays. I happened to make the innocent comment: "Isn't it silly to have a holiday to celebrate a God who doesn't exist? But a few days off from work is still very nice." One of my friends piped up and said "God that doesn't exist? Are you one of those people that believes we all descended from chimps?" Usually such a comment would get me into an argument, but it was such a lovely Melbourne day so I subtly I suggested we all go to Acland street and have a few drinks. But I got to thinking about how important Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection has been. Even if you believe that God created the Earth and the heavens, Darwinian thought has given science a new and powerful perspective on how to view things.

In a recent post, I described how viruses evolve resistance to antibiotics - using Darwinian principles of natural selection. Natural selection occurs in our own bodies in other ways. One example is in our immune systems. In our bodies we have proteins called antibodies, which can recognise foreign molecules, bacteria and viruses, and bind to them. Any foreign body or antigen injected into the body will stimulate the production of a complementary antibody that is instrumental in the immune defence. The antibody genes of each individual lead to the production of a huge number of different antibodies. Exposure of this huge repertoire of antibodies to a foreign molecule - e.g. a virus - is followed by the selection and growth of the cells which have only the antibodies that fit the invading foreign molecule sufficiently well.

Even our own brain development can be seen from a Darwinian point of view and, indeed, it has been. Neural Darwinism is a term first used by Nobel Prize winning scientist Gerald Edelman. At the early developmental stage of the brain, synaptic connections between neurons are established. Then, these connections are weakened and strengthened according to their individual activity. Then, with the individual's experience, changes in the strengths of the synapses occur favoring some pathways over others. The most-used connections are kept and strengthened, while the least-used ones are dissolved.

Scientists have invoked Darwinism to explain many diverse phenomena; we have Social Darwinism, which attempts to apply Darwin's principles to explain social behaviour, and Evolutionary Psychology, which attempts to explain mental and psychological characteristics as useful products of natural selection. Charles Darwin himself would never have dreamed that his ideas would be taken so far.

It's all well and good to be able to apply Darwinian philosophy to our own flesh-and-blood bodies - after all, natural selection belongs in the realm of biological science. But how about applying it to the big picture - the universe. The religious fundamentalists of our world say that life on Earth is a miracle that can only be attributed to God - not by a "series of chance mutations" - and I guess they would say the same about the universe - the planets, the stars, the galaxies. Our universe exists thanks to the laws of physics being "just right"; it appears that "by sheer coincidence or act of God", the laws of physics are just perfect to allow life to exist. For example, the electrical force between 2 protons is 10^38 times stronger than the gravitational force between 2 protons. If, instead, the electrical force was 10^37 times stronger than gravity (i.e. gravity was 10 times stronger than it is), a star the size of our sun would live for only 10 million years instead of 10 billion years ... certainly not enough time for intelligent life to evolve on Earth. Another coincidence arises due to the relative masses of electrons, protons and neutrons. A neutron outweighs a proton by about the mass of an electron, and the size of an electron is much smaller than that of a proton. If this were not the case, it would not be possible to form atoms, which means that there would be no stars and no chemistry.
Our universe is large enough to accommodate stars; why is it not smaller - say, the size of a pin head; is it another coincidence?

It can't be just a mere coincidence; surely there is a God that who kindly set up the conditions and the physical laws so that we could exist. Or maybe it is just a coincidence and we exist only due to a series of improbable events.
Well, again, Darwinian thought has been used to attempt to explain this "accidental universe" of ours. I recently read a book called "The Life of the Cosmos" by Lee Smolin. Smolin attempts to use Darwinian philosophy and black holes to explain our existence. It's a speculative attempt at an explanation, but very interesting and it's backed up by a lot of logic and data. Here's how it works:
It is said that the Big Bang - the birth of our universe - came from a singularity. Singularities are also said to occur in black holes. A black hole is basically a star that has collapsed into a singularity in our universe's spacetime. One theory tells us that any material that falls into this singularity will emerge as an expanding singularity in another spacetime - i.e. in another universe. It is as if our universe has given birth to a baby universe using a collapsing star as a vehicle. Our universe would be connected to its offspring via a "wormhole". If one universe can be born from a black hole, then there may be an infinite number of universes connected by a vast network of wormholes. Of course, this also means that our universe was probably born out of a black hole in another universe.

Lee Smolin's idea is that every time a black hole collapses into a singularity and a baby universe is born, the laws of physics are slightly different in the new universe ... just the same as a human child is genetically slightly different from his/her parents. If the laws of physics in the new universe allows the creation of a lot of stars and a lot of black holes - thus giving birth to more baby universes - this new universe would be a successful universe. If, on the other hand, the baby universe does not expand very much, it will die without leaving any progeny, and it would be an unsuccessful universe. Also, there is competition as the many universes jostle for room in the multidimensional spacetime. The successful universes - the ones that have the laws of physics which encourage the formations of stars and black holes - will be the ones that have the potential to evolve life. It's reminiscent of successful/unsuccessful species on Earth.

2007 is the 125th anniversary of Charles Darwin's passing, but it seems that his legacy - one of the great achievements of humanity - will never die.

To my Italian friends

2007-03-31T17:36:00.000-07:00

Nel precedente post avevo inserito un racconto di Isaac Asimov intitolato "The Last Question" (L'ultima Domanda) - forse il miglior scritto di Asimov. Ho appena trovato una traduzione Italiana. Enjoy:

L'ultima Domanda
Di Isaac Asimov

L'ultima domanda venne posta per la prima volta, quasi per scherzo, il 21 maggio 2061, in un momento in cui l'umanità cominciava a intravedere finalmente un po' di luce. La domanda era il risultato di una scommessa di cinque dollari, nata durante una bevuta, ed ecco come andò la cosa:

Alexander Adell e Bertram Lupov erano due dei fedeli assistenti addetti a Multívac. Sapevano - così come era dato saperlo a due esseri umani - che cosa c'era dietro la fredda, lampeggiante, ticchettante faccia - chilometri e chilometri di faccia - del gigantesco calcolatore. Avevano se non altro una nozione vaga del piano generale di relay e di circuiti che da tempo aveva superato il limite oltre il quale una singola mente umana non poteva assolutamente conservare una chiara visione d'insieme.

Multivac si auto-regolava e si auto-correggeva. Doveva essere così, perché nessun essere umano poteva regolarlo o correggerlo con sufficiente rapidità o in modo adeguato. Così, Adell e Lupov badavano al mostruoso gigante solo in modo leggero e superficiale, e al tempo stesso come meglio non era possibile, trattandosi di uomini. Vi inserivano dati, adattavano le domande alle necessità del calcolatore e traducevano le risposte che questo forniva. Senza dubbio, tanto loro due che gli altri loro colleghi avevano pieno diritto di bearsi della gloria che spettava a Multivac.

Per decenni, Multivac aveva dato una mano, per così dire, a progettare le navi e a calcolare le traiettorie che mettevano in grado gli uomini di arrivare sulla Luna, su Marte e su Venere ma, al di là di quelli, le scarse risorse della Terra non consentivano alle navi di affrontare il viaggio. Troppa energia era richiesta per i lunghi percorsi. La Terra sfruttava le sue riserve di carbone e di uranio con efficienza crescente, ma in sé quelle riserve erano limitate.

Lentamente, tuttavia, Multivac aveva imparato quanto bastava per rispondere in modo più fondamentale a domande più profonde e, il 14 maggio 2061, quella che era stata una teoria, era diventata un fatto concreto.

L'energia del sole veniva ora immagazzinata, trasformata e utilizzata direttamente, su scala planetaria. La Terra intera poteva spegnere i suoi fuochi alimentati a carbone e le sue centrali nucleari, per far scattare l'interruttore che connetteva il tutto a una piccola stazione, di un chilometro e mezzo di diametro, in orbita attorno alla Terra a una distanza che era la metà di quella della Luna. Tutto, sulla Terra, funzionava ora grazie agli invisibili raggi dell'energia solare.

Sette giorni non erano bastati a offuscare la gloria di quell'avvenimento, ma Adell e Lupov riuscirono finalmente a sottrarsi alle celebrazioni pubbliche per rifugiarsi in santa pace dove nessuno avrebbe pensato di cercarli, ossia nelle deserte sale sotterranee dove s'intravedevano alcune parti del possente corpo sepolto di Multivac.

Si erano portati una bottiglia, e la loro unica preoccupazione, al momento, era di rilassarsi l'uno in compagnia dell'altro e con l'aiuto di un abbondante beveraggio.

"E’ incredibile, se ci pensi bene" disse Adell. La larga faccia era segnata dalla stanchezza, ed egli agitava lentamente la bibita con una cannuccia di vetro, osservando i cubetti di ghiaccio nei loro stentati spostamenti. "Tutta l'energia che potremmo mai desiderare di usare, completamente gratuita. Energia a sufficienza, qualora decidessimo di farne spreco, per fondere tutta la Terra in un unico gocciolone di ferro liquido e impuro, senza minimamente dar fondo, per questo, alla riserva totale. Tutta l'energia che potremo mai usare, insomma, per sempre, per sempre e ancora per sempre."

Lupov piegò la testa da un lato. Era un vezzo, che aveva, quando si metteva in mente di fare il Bastian contrario; e ne aveva una gran voglia, in quel momento, forse perché era toccato a lui procurare il ghiaccio e i bicchieri. "Per sempre poi no" disse.

"Andiamo Bert, praticamente per sempre, sì. Fino a che il sole non sarà scarico, per lo meno."

"Be', non per sempre, allora."

"Ma sì, come vuoi tu. Per miliardi e miliardi di anni. Venti miliardi, facciamo. Soddisfatto, sì?"

Lupov si passò le dita tra i capelli sempre più radi, come per assicurarsi che gliene rimanesse ancora qualcuno, e sorseggiò pian pianino la sua bibita. "Venti miliardi di anni non è per sempre."

"Be', durerà almeno finché ci siamo noi, no?"

"Se è per questo, sarebbero durati anche il carbone e l'uranio."

"D'accordo, ma ora possiamo allacciare ogni singola nave alla Stazione Solare, e farla andare e tornare da Plutone un milione di volte senza doverci più preoccupare del combustibile. Prova a farlo con il carbone e l'uranio, se sei capace! Del resto, se non mi credi, domandalo a Multivac."
"Non ho bisogno di domandarlo a Multivac. Lo so."
"Allora piantala di minimizzare quello che Multivac ha fatto per noi" disse Adell, accalorandosi. "E’ stato bravissimo!"

"Chi dice di no? Io dico solo che un sole non dura in eterno. Basta, non ho detto altro! Per venti miliardi di anni siamo tranquilli; e poi?" Lupov puntò contro l'altro l'indice che tremava leggermente. "E non venire a dirmi che potremo attaccarci a un altro sole."

Per un po', rimasero in silenzio. Solo di tanto in tanto Adell si portava il bicchiere alle labbra, e Lupov un po' alla volta aveva chiuso gli occhi. Riposavano, tutti e due.

Poi, Lupov riaprì gli occhi di scatto. "Stai pensando che, quando il nostro sarà esaurito, ci attaccheremo a un altro sole, vero?"

"Non sto pensando affatto."

"Sì, invece. Tu manchi di senso logico, ecco qual è il tuo difetto. Sei come quel tale della storiella, che essendo stato sorpreso da un acquazzone era corso fino a un boschetto e si era rifugiato sotto un albero. Era tranquillo, lui, perché pensava che, una volta che si fosse bagnato ben bene quell'albero lì, non doveva fare altro che spostarsi sotto un altro."

"Ho capito, sì" disse Adell. "E’ inutile che gridi. Una volta spento il nostro sole, anche le altre stelle si saranno esaurite, nel frattempo"

"Puoi star sicuro che si saranno esaurite" borbottò Lupov. "Tutto ha avuto origine in una prima esplosione cosmica, qualsiasi cosa fosse, e tutto avrà una fine quando le stelle si saranno scaricate ben bene. Alcune si spegneranno più in fretta di altre. Le stelle giganti dureranno al massimo cento milioni di anni. Il sole durerà venti miliardi di anni, mettiamo, e le nane potranno durare cento miliardi di anni, per quel che servono. Ma lascia che passi un trilione d'anni, e tutto sarà sprofondato nel buio. L'entropia deve per forza raggiungere un massimo, tutto qui."

"So tutto dell'entropia" disse Adell, con un tono di dignità offesa.

"Davvero? Non si direbbe." "Ne so tanto quanto te." "Allora sai anche che tutto finirà per decadere, prima o poi."

"D'accordo. Chi ha detto il contrario?"

"Tu, l'hai detto, povero mammalucco. Hai detto che avevamo tutta l'energia di cui abbiamo bisogno, per sempre. Hai detto proprio "per sempre"."

Era Adell, ora, in vena di contraddire. "Può anche darsi che, un giorno o l'altro, si riesca a ricostituire tutto."

"Mai!"

"Perché no? Un giorno, non so quando."

" Domandalo a Multivac."

" Questo poi no."

"Domandalo a Multivac, ti dico! Facciamo una scommessa: mi gioco cinque dollari che ti dirà di no anche lui." Adell era abbastanza brillo per provare, abbastanza in sé per poter comporre i simboli e le operazioni necessarie per una domanda che, in parole, sarebbe suonata press'a poco così: Potrà un giorno il genere umano, senza dispendio di energia, essere in grado di riportare il sole alla sua piena giovinezza perfino dopo che sarà morto di vecchiaia?

O magari, in maniera più semplice, si sarebbe potuta formulare così: Com'è possibile diminuire in modo massiccio il quantitativo di entropia dell'universo?

Multivac si fece immobile e muto. I lenti lampi di luce cessarono, i lontani rumori del ticchettio dei relay si fermarono.

Poi, proprio quando i due tecnici terrorizzati sentivano di non farcela più a trattenere il respiro, vi fu un improvviso ritorno alla vita della telescrivente collegata con quella parte di Multivac. Le parole erano cinque in tutto: DATI INSUFFICIENTI PER RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA.

"Niente scommessa" bisbigliò Lupov. E insieme si allontanarono in fretta dal sotterraneo.

Il mattino dopo i due amici, afflitti dal mal di testa e dalla bocca impastata, avevano già dimenticato l'incidente.

***

Jerrodd, Jerrodine e Jerrodette I e II osservavano sul quadro visivo i cambiamenti dello stellato mentre il passaggio attraverso l'iperspazio veniva completato in un lasso di nontempo. Tutto a un tratto, il pulviscolo di stelle cedette il posto alla predominanza di una singola e vivida biglia, proprio al centro del quadro.

"Quello è X-23," disse Jerrodd, senza un attimo di esitazione. Intrecciò con forza le mani scarne dietro di sé, tanto che le nocche gli si sbiancarono.

Le piccole Jerrodette, due sorelline, avevano fatto per la prima volta in vita loro l'esperienza del passaggio nell'iperspazio ed erano un po' imbarazzate a causa della momentanea sensazione di uscire da se stesse. Soffocavano le risate dietro le manine e si rincorrevano a vicenda attorno alla mamma, facendo un baccano indiavolato. "Siamo arrivati su X-23" gridavano, "siamo arrivati su X-23... siamo..." "Buone, bambine" le zittì Jerrodine, in tono severo. "Sei sicuro, Jerrodd?"

"Come si fa a non esserne sicuri?" ribatté Jerrodd, levando lo sguardo all'uniforme sporgenza metallica proprio al di sotto del soffitto. La sporgenza correva lungo tutta la cabina scomparendo poi attraverso le paratie alle due estremità. Era lunga come l'intera astronave.

Jerrodd non sapeva quasi niente a proposito di quel grosso tubo metallico, salvo che veniva chiamato Microvac; che, volendo, era possibile rivolgergli delle domande; che, oltre a rispondere a eventuali domande, aveva il compito di guidare la nave fino a preordinata destinazione. Inoltre, Microvac provvedeva a rifornirsi di energia dalle varie Stazioni Erogatrici Sub-Galattiche e, infine, risolveva le equazioni per i balzi iperspaziali.

Jerrodd e la sua famiglia non dovevano fare altro che aspettare, comodamente alloggiati nelle cabine dell'astronave.

Qualcuno, una volta, aveva detto a Jerrodd che "ac", alla fine di Microvac, in inglese antico stava per "calcolatore analogico", ma lui era ormai in procinto di dimenticare perfino questo.

Jerrodine aveva gli occhi lucidi, nel fissare il quadro visivo. "Non so cosa farci. Mi sento molto scossa al pensiero d'avere lasciato la Terra."

"Ma perché, benedetta donna?" si meravigliò Jerrodd. "Non avevamo niente, laggiù, mentre su X-23 avremo praticamente tutto. Non ti sentirai sola, perché non sarai una pioniera: sul pianeta c'è già un milione e più di persone. Santo cielo, se pensi che i nostri pronipoti dovranno cercarsi nuovi mondi, perché X-23 sarà già sovraffollato!" Poi, dopo una pausa di riflessione: "Credi a me, è una vera fortuna che i calcolatori abbiano risolto il problema dei viaggi interstellari, considerato il modo come si moltiplica la razza."

"Lo so, lo so" convenne Jerrodine, avvilita.

"Il nostro Microvac" saltò su Jerrodette 1, "è il Microvac migliore del mondo."

"Certo, lo penso anch'io" disse Jerrodd, arruffandole i riccioli.

In effetti era bello poter avere un Microvac tutto per sé, e Jerrodd era contento di appartenere alla sua generazione. Al tempo in cui era giovane suo padre, gli unici calcolatori esistenti erano dei tremendi macchinoni che occupavano centinaia di chilometri quadrati di terra. Ce n'era non più di uno per pianeta. AC Planetari, si chiamavano. Per migliaia d'anni, non avevano fatto che aumentare di dimensioni finché, tutt'a un tratto, era subentrato il raffinamento tecnico. Al posto dei transistori, erano venute le valvole molecolari, per cui perfino il più grande degli AC Planetari poteva trovar posto in uno spazio pari alla metà del volume di una astronave.

Jerrodd provava un senso di esaltazione, cosa che sempre gli accadeva quando si ricordava che il suo Microvac personale era di gran lunga più complicato dell'antico e primitivo Multivac che per primo aveva domato il Sole, nonché quasi altrettanto complesso dell'AC Planetario Terrestre (il più grande di tutti) che per primo aveva risolto il problema del viaggio interstellare e reso possibile spostarsi da una stella all'altra.

"Tante stelle, altrettanti pianeti" sospirò Jerrodine, immersa nelle proprie meditazioni. "Le famiglie non faranno che trasferirsi su nuovi pianeti, per sempre, proprio come stiamo per fare noi ora."

"Per sempre no" corresse Jerrodd, con un sorriso. "Un giorno o l'altro, tutto si fermerà, ma prima che accada dovranno passare miliardi di anni. Molti miliardi. Perfino le stelle si esauriscono, come ben sai. L'entropia deve per forza aumentare."

"Che cos'è l'entropia, papà?" strillò Jerrodette II.

"L'entropia, cara, è una... un termine, ecco. Significa il quantitativo di decadimento dell'universo. Tutto si... - si scarica, diciamo così. Come il tuo piccolo robot walkie-talkie, ricordi?"

"E non si può inserire una nuova unità-di-energia, come facevamo per il mio robot?"

"Le stelle sono le unità di energia, mia cara. Una volta esaurite quelle, non ne rimangono più."

All'istante, Jerrodette I scoppiò in un pianto disperato. "No, - no, papà, non voglio! Non lasciare che le stelle si scarichino, papà!"

"Hai visto cos'hai fatto, ora?" bisbigliò Jerrodine, esasperata.

"Come potevo immaginare che si sarebbero spaventate?" bisbigliò Jerrodd di rimando.

"Domandalo al Microvac" singhiozzò Jerrodette I. "Domandagli come si fa per riaccendere le stelle."

"Coraggio, domandaglielo" disse Jerrodine. "Chissà che non serva a calmarle." (Anche Jerrodette II aveva cominciato a piagnucolare.)

Jerrodd si rassegnò. "Buone, su, bambine. Ora sentiamo da Microvac, eh? Vedrete che ce lo dirà, state tranquille." Rivolse la domanda al Microvac, affrettandosi ad aggiungere: "Rispondi per iscritto".

Qualche istante dopo, faceva sparire nel palmo la sottile striscia di cellufilm e diceva allegramente: "Ecco qua, Microvac dice di non preoccuparsi, che quando verrà il momento penserà lui a tutto."

"E adesso a letto, bambine" intervenne Jerrodine. "Tra poco saremo nella nostra nuova casa."

Prima di distruggere la strisciolina di cellufilm, Jerrodd lesse ancora una volta le parole: DATI INSUFFICIENTI PER RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA.

Con un'alzata di spalle, riportò l'attenzione sul quadro visivo. X-23 era vicinissimo, ormai.

***

VJ-23X di Lameth fissò le nere profondità della mappa tridimensionale su scala ridotta della Galassia e domandò: "Che dici, siamo ridicoli a preoccuparci tanto della questione?"

MQ-17J di Nicron scosse la testa. "Non direi. Si sa che, al presente tasso di espansione, nel giro di cinque anni la Galassia si popolerà completamente."

Sembravano entrambi sul principio della ventina, erano tutti e due alti e perfettamente formati.

"D'altra parte" osservò VJ-23X, "non so se sia il caso di presentare un rapporto pessimistico al Consiglio Galattico."

"Io non esiterei, invece. È il solo rapporto possibile, secondo me. Li scuoterà un po', si spera. Bisogna scuoterli, caro mio."

VJ-23X sospirò. "Lo spazio è infinito. Cento miliardi di Galassie sono là che aspettano d'essere popolate. Ma che dico, di più!"

"Cento miliardi non sono affatto l'infinito, e per di più lo sono sempre di meno, a mano a mano che il tempo passa. Ma rifletti! Ventimila anni fa, l'umanità risolse il problema di come utilizzare l'energia stellare e, pochi secoli più tardi, il viaggio interstellare divenne una cosa possibile. Ebbene, l'umanità che aveva impiegato un milione di anni a saturare un unico, piccolo mondo, da quel momento ne ha impiegati soltanto quindicimila per riempire il resto della Galassia. Ora, ogni dieci anni la popolazione raddoppia..."

"Possiamo ringraziare l'immortalità per questo" lo interruppe VJ-23X.

"Siamo d'accordo. Ma l'immortalità esiste, e non ci resta che tenerne conto. Intendiamoci, il suo lato negativo ce l'ha, non lo metto in dubbio. L'AC Galattico avrà risolto molti problemi, non discuto, ma nel risolvere quello per prevenire la vecchiaia e la morte, ha mandato a Patrasso tutte le altre sue soluzioni."

"E d'altra parte, sii sincero: saresti disposto ad abbandonare la vita?"

"Neanche per idea" scattò MQ-17J, subito moderandosi e aggiungendo: "Non ancora. Sono ancora giovane, alla fin fine. Tu quanti anni hai?"

"Duecentoventitré. E tu?"

"Sono ancora sotto i duecento, io... Ma, per tornare al discorso di prima, la popolazione, dicevo, raddoppia ogni dieci anni. Una volta saturata questa Galassia, nel giro di dieci anni ne avremo popolata un'altra. Altri dieci anni, e ne avremo riempite altre due. Altro decennio, e ne avremo saturate altre quattro. Tempo un centinaio d'anni, e di Galassie ne avremo riempite un migliaio. In mille anni, un milione di Galassie. In diecímila anni, l'intero Universo conosciuto. E poi?"

"Senza contare" osservò VJ-23X, "che esiste un problema tutt'altro che secondario, ossia quello del trasporto. Mi domando quante unità di energia solare ci vorranno per trasferire Galassie di individui da una Galassia all'altra."

"Osservazione quanto mai pertinente! Già oggi, l'umanità consuma qualcosa come due unità di energia solare all'anno."

"Di cui la maggior parte va sprecata. In fin dei conti, la nostra Galassia da sola riversa un migliaio di unità d'energia solare all'anno, di cui noi ne usiamo soltanto due." "D'accordo, ma anche con un'efficienza del cento per cento, non faremmo che rinviare la fine. Le nostre richieste di energia aumentano, in proporzione geometrica, anche più rapidamente della nostra popolazione. Esauriremo l'energia solare prim'ancora d'avere esaurito le Galassie. Hai fatto un'osservazione giusta. Sì, giustissima."

"Ci toccherà costruire nuove stelle, ricavandole dal gas interstellare."

"O dal calore dissipato?" domandò con sarcasmo MQ17J.

"Chissà che non esista un modo di invertire l'entropia?

Dovremmo proprio domandarlo all'AC Galattico."

VJ-23X non diceva sul serio, ma MQ-17J estrasse di tasca il suo Contatto-AC e lo posò sul tavolo, davanti a sé.

"Ho una mezza voglia di farlo" disse. "È, un argomento che la razza umana dovrà pure affrontare, un giorno o l'altro."

Fissava cupamente il suo piccolo Contatto-AC. In sé, l'apparecchio era un piccolo cubo insignificante, ma era collegato, attraverso l'iperspazio, con il grande AC Galattico che serviva tutto il genere umano. Tenuto conto dell'iperspazio, l'apparecchietto era parte integrale dell'AC Galattico.

MQ-17J si soffermò a domandarsi se, nel corso della sua vita immortale, sarebbe riuscito e vedere da vicino l'AC Galattico. L'AC stava su un piccolo pianeta tutto suo, ragnatela di linee di forza che abbracciava la materia entro la quale ondate di sub-mesoni prendevano il posto delle rozze valvole molecolari di un tempo. Tuttavia, nonostante i suoi dispositivo sub-eterici, era risaputo che l'AC Galattico si estendeva per ben trecento metri.

"Sarà mai possibile invertire l'entropia?" domandò inaspettatamente MQ-17J al suo Contatto-AC.

VJ-23X trasalì e si affrettò a precisare: "Ma, dì un po'. non pensavo certo che glielo domandassi davvero, sai?" "Perché no?"

"Perché sappiamo benissimo che non è possibile invertire l'entropia. Non si può ritrasformare fumo e cenere in un albero."

"Avete alberi sul vostro pianeta?" domandò MQ-17J.

Il suono dell'AC Galattico li zittì all'improvviso, facendoli trasalire. La voce del possente calcolatore usciva bella e un po' fievole dal piccolo Contatto-AC posato sulla scrivania. DATI INSUFFICIENTI PER RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA, disse.

"Hai sentito?" mormorò VJ-23X.

Dopo di che, i due uomini ritornarono alla questione del rapporto da presentare al Consiglio Galattico.

***

La mente di Zee Prime misurò a spanne la nuova Galassia, mostrando soltanto un vago interesse per le innumerevoli stelle che la incipriavano. Sicuramente non l'aveva mai vista, quella. Sarebbe mai riuscito a vederle tutte? Numerose com'erano, ciascuna con il suo carico di umanità... Ma un carico che era più che altro un peso morto. Sempre di più, la vera essenza dell'uomo andava ricercata là fuori, nello spazio.

Menti, non corpi! I corpi immortali rimanevano laggiù sui pianeti, come sospesi al di sopra del tempo. Talvolta si ridestavano a un'attività materiale, ma il fenomeno si faceva sempre più raro. Pochi individui nuovi vedevano la luce e andavano ad aumentare le imponenti masse di moltitudini, ma che importanza aveva? Non c'era più spazio nell'Universo, ormai, per nuovi individui.

Zee Prime si scosse dalle sue meditazioni nell'imbattersi nelle volute lievi di un'altra mente.

"Sono Zee Prime" disse Zee Prime. "E tu?"

"Mi chiamo Dee Sub Wun. La tua Galassia?"

"La chiamiamo soltanto Galassia. E tu?"

"Anche noi la chiamiamo soltanto così. Tutti chiamano così la loro Galassia. Che male c'è?"

"Ah, figurati! Tra l'altro, sono tutte uguali."

"Proprio tutte, no. Su una particolare Galassia, la razza umana deve avere avuto origine, e questo la rende diversa."

"Su quale?" domandò Zee Prime.

"Non saprei. Ma l'AC Universale dovrebbe saperlo."

"Vogliamo domandarglielo? Ora m'hai messo in curiosità."

Le percezioni di Zee Prime si dilatarono fino a che le Galassie stesse si rimpicciolirono e divennero uno spolverìo diverso e più diffuso sopra uno sfondo assai più vasto. A centinaia di miliardi, ve n'erano, tutte con i loro esseri immortali, tutte recanti il loro carico di intelligenze, con menti che fluttuavano liberamente nello spazio. Eppure, una di esse era unica tra tutte, in quanto era la Galassia originale. Una di esse, nel suo vago e distante passato, aveva un periodo in cui era stata l'unica Galassia popolata dall'uomo.

Zee Prime ardeva dalla curiosità di vedere quella Galassia e chiamò: "AC Universale! Su quale Galassia ha avuto origine il genere umano?"

L'AC Universale udì, poiché su ogni mondo e attraverso tutto lo spazio aveva pronti i suoi ricettori, e ogni ricettore, attraverso l'iperspazio, conduceva a qualche punto ignoto dove l'AC Universale si teneva in disparte. Zee Prime sapeva di un solo uomo i cui pensieri erano penetrati entro una distanza dalla quale era ancora possibile captare l'AC Universale, e costui aveva riferito d'avere intravisto a fatica un globo luminoso, del diametro di mezzo metro.

"Ma è mai possibile che l'AC Universale sia tutto lì?" aveva domandato Zee Prime.

"La maggior parte di esso" era stata la risposta, "è nell'iperspazio. Sotto quale forma, proprio non saprei immaginare."

Né alcuno lo poteva, perché ne era passato di tempo, Zee Prime lo sapeva, dal giorno in cui un uomo aveva avuto una parte sia pure secondaria nella creazione di un AC Universale. Ciascun AC Universale progettava e costruiva il suo successore. Ciascun AC, durante la sua esistenza di un milione di anni e più, accumulava i dati necessari a costruire un successore migliore, più complesso ed efficiente, in cui il suo stesso bagaglio di dati e di individualità sarebbe rimasto sommerso.

L'AC Universale interruppe i pensieri divaganti di Zee Prime, non con parole ma con una sorta di influsso direttivo. Zee Prime venne guidato entro il confuso mare delle Galassie fino a che una in particolare si ingrandì, mostrandosi in tutte le sue stelle.

Un pensiero, infinitamente lontano ma infinitamente chiaro, arrivò a Zee Prime: QUESTA E’ LA GALASSIA ORIGINALE DELL'UOMO.

Ma era identica a tutte le altre, alla fin fine e Zee Prime soffocò il suo disappunto.

Dee Sub Wun, la cui mente aveva accompagnato l'altra, domandò all'improvviso: "E una di queste è la stella originale dell'Uomo?"

LA STELLA ORIGINALE DELL'UOMO E’ DIVENTATA UNA NOVA, rispose l'AC Universale. E’ UNA NANA BIANCA.

"E gli uomini che ci vivevano sono morti?" domandò Zee Prime, senza riflettere.

COME SEMPRE IN QUESTI CASI, disse l'AC Universale, PER I LORO CORPI E’, STATO COSTRUITO IN TEMPO UN MONDO NUOVO.

"Eh, già, è vero" disse Zee Prime, ma ugualmente si sentiva sopraffatto da un senso di vuoto. La sua mente allentò la presa sulla Galassia originale dell’Uomo, lasciò che questa si ritraesse bruscamente fino a perdersi tra l'ammasso confuso di punti luminosi. Si augurava di non rivederla più.

"Che c'è?" domandò Dee Sub Wun. "Qualcosa che non va?"

"Le stelle stanno morendo. La stella originale è morta."

"Che c'è di strano? Tutte devono morire."

"Ma quando tutta l'energia si sarà esaurita, moriranno anche i nostri corpi, e tu e io con loro."

"Ci vorranno miliardi di anni."

Ma io non voglio che accada, nemmeno tra miliardi di anni. "AC Universale! Come si può impedire che le stelle muoiano?"

Divertito, Dee Sub Wun osservò: "Stai domandandogli come si potrebbe invertire l'andamento dell'entropia."

PER ORA MANCANO DATI SUFFICIENTI, rispose l'AC Universale, PER UNA RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA.

Zee Prime lasciò che i suoi pensieri riaffluíssero verso la sua vera Galassia. Non si curò più di Dee Sub Wun, il cui corpo poteva essere in attesa su una Galassia distante un trilione di anni luce, così come sulla stella accanto a quella di Zee Prime. Non aveva importanza.

Desolato, Zee Prime cominciò a raccogliere idrogeno interstellare con il quale costruirsi una stellina tutta per sé. Se anche le stelle dovevano morire tutte, prima o poi, per ora era ancora possibile costruirne qualcuna.

***

L'Uomo rifletteva tra sé e sé, perché in un certo senso, mentalmente, l'Uomo era unico. Era formato da trilioni, trilioni e trilioni di corpi senza età, ciascuno al suo posto, ciascuno immobile e incorruttibile, ciascuno accudito da automi perfetti e altrettanto incorruttibili, mentre le menti di tutti quei corpi si fondevano liberamente l'una nell’altra, indistinguibili.

"L’Universo sta morendo" disse l'Uomo.

Guardò, intorno a sé, le Galassie sempre più fioche. Le stelle giganti, così spendaccione, si erano spente da un pezzo, laggiù nel buio del più oscuro passato remoto. Quasi tutte le stelle erano nane bianche, sul punto di spegnersi.

Nuove stelle erano state costruite con la polvere interstellare, alcune per un processo naturale, altre dall'Uomo stesso, e anche quelle stavano per decadere. Era ancora possibile far cozzare tra loro delle nane bianche e, dalle possenti forze così sprigionate, far scaturire nuove stelle; ma una soltanto, ogni mille nane bianche distrutte, e anche quelle poche, presto o tardi, avrebbero finito per decadere.

"Amministrata con estrema oculatezza, secondo i dettami dell'AC Cosmico" disse l'Uomo, "l'energia che ancora rimane nell'Universo durerà miliardi di anni."

"Ciò nonostante" obiettò l'Uomo, "prima o poi tutto avrà una fine. Per quanto oculatamente amministrata, per quanto sfruttata al massimo, l'energia, una volta spesa, è perduta per sempre, e nessuno può sostituirla. L'entropia non può che aumentare, fino a raggiungere un massimo."

"È possibile invertire l'entropia?" domandò infine l’Uomo. "Sentiamo che cosa ne dice l'AC Cosmico."

L'AC Cosmico li circondava, ma non nello spazio. Neppure un frammento di AC Cosmico si trovava nello spazio.

Era nell'iperspazio, ed era fatto di qualcosa che non era né materia né energia. Il problema delle sue dimensioni e della sua natura non era più traducibile in termini che l'Uomo potesse comprendere.

"AC Cosmico" invocò l'Uomo, "è possibile invertire l'entropia?"

FINORA, rispose l'AC Cosmico, NON ABBIAMO DATI SUFFICIENTI PER UNA RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA.

"Raccogline altri" ordinò l'Uomo.

LO FARO’, disse l'AC Cosmico. LO STO FACENDO DA CENTO MILIARDI DI ANNI., I MIEI PREDECESSORI E IO CI SIAMO SENTITI FARE QUESTA DOMANDA MOLTE VOLTE. TUTTI I DATI CHE HO RIMANGONO INSUFFICIENTI.

"Verrà un tempo" domandò l'Uomo, "in cui i dati saranno sufficienti, o questo problema è insolubile in tutte le circostanze possibili e immaginabili?"

NESSUN PROBLEMA È INSOLUBILE IN TUTTE LE CIRCOSTANZE POSSIBILI E IMMAGINABILI, rispose l'AC Cosmico.

"Quando avrai dati sufficienti per rispondere alla domanda?" volle sapere l'Uomo.

FINORA I DATI SONO INSUFFICIENTI PER UNA RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA, rispose l'AC Cosmico.

"Continuerai a occupartene?" domandò l'Uomo.

LO FARO’, promise l'AC Cosmico.

"Aspetteremo" disse l'Uomo.

***

Le stelle e le Galassie morirono e si spensero, e lo spazio, dopo dieci trilioni d'anni di decadimento, divenne nero.

Un individuo alla volta, l'Uomo si fuse con AC, e ciascun corpo fisico perdeva la sua idoneità mentale in un modo che, a conti fatti, non si traduceva in una perdita ma in un guadagno.

L'ultima mente dell'Uomo esitò, prima della fusione, contemplando uno spazio che comprendeva soltanto i fondi di un'ultima stella quasi spenta e nient'altro che materia incredibilmente rarefatta, agitata a casaccio da rimasugli finali di calore che calava, asintoticamente, verso lo zero assoluto.

"È questa la fine, AC?" domandò l'Uomo. "Non è possibile ritrasformare ancora una volta questo caos nell'Universo? Non si può invertire il processo?,"

MANCANO ANCORA I DATI SUFFICIENTI PER UNA RISPOSTA SIGNIFICATIVA, disse AC.

L'ultima mente dell'Uomo si fuse e soltanto AC esisteva, ormai... nell'iperspazio.

***

Materia ed energia erano terminate e, con esse, lo spazio e il tempo. Perfino AC esisteva unicamente in nome di quell'ultima domanda alla quale non c'era mai stata risposta dal tempo in cui un assistente semi-ubriaco, dieci trilioni d'anni prima, l'aveva rivolta a un calcolatore che stava ad AC assai meno di quanto l'uomo stesse all'Uomo.

Tutte le altre domande avevano avuto risposta e, finché quell'ultima non fosse stata anch’essa soddisfatta, AC non si sarebbe forse liberato della consapevolezza di sé.

Tutti i dati raccolti erano arrivati alla fine, ormai. Da raccogliere, non rimaneva più niente.

Ma i dati raccolti dovevano ancora essere correlati e accostati secondo tutte le relazioni possibili.

Un intervallo senza tempo venne speso a far questo.

E accadde, così, che AC scoprisse come si poteva invertire l'andamento dell'entropia.

Ma ormai non c'era nessuno cui AC potesse fornire la risposta all'ultima domanda. Pazienza! La risposta - per dimostrazione - avrebbe provveduto anche a questo.

Per un altro intervallo senza tempo, AC pensò al modo migliore per riuscirci. Con cura, AC organizzò il programma.

La coscienza di AC abbracciò tutto quello che un tempo era stato un Universo e meditò sopra quello che adesso era Caos. Un passo alla volta, così bisognava procedere.

LA LUCE SIA! disse AC.

E la luce fu ...

The Last Question

2007-03-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

How will the universe die? One theory is that it will die a "heat death" over countless trillions of years. Stars will run out of nuclear fuel, planets will be dislodged from their orbits, protons will decay (a proton is believed to have a half-life of 10^36 years), black holes will evaporate and disintegrate (it is estimated that a black hole the size of the sun will last 10^66 years). All the matter that formerly constituted planets, stars and galaxies will be reduced to just photons and leptons. The universe will be in a state of maximum entropy and complete thermodynamic equilibrium. The entire universe will have a constant temperature throughout space, and energy will be uniformly distributed. With no temperature difference, no work can happen and the universe will be a cold lifeless place.

What will happen next? The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system that is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. Assuming that our universe is really an isolated system (as opposed to an open system), is there any "loophole" in the second law of thermodynamics that can save our universe?

Isaac Asimov wrote a sci-fi short story in 1956 – yes, 1956 – which addressed the above scenario. The story begins in the year of our Lord 2061, when a gigantic computer is asked whether it is inevitable that the universe must die: "How can the net entropy of the universe be massively decreased" – that is the question. The story spans trillions of years of humanity, and the question is asked throughout the ages. The answer, when it comes, is breathtaking and mind-blowing.

If you’ve never read it, here it is ...

The Last Question
By Isaac Asimov

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way: Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. So Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac's.
For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.
But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.
The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.
Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public functions, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it.
They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle.
"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever."
Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. "Not forever," he said.
"Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."
"That's not forever."
"All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Ten billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"
Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Ten billion years isn't forever."
"Well, it will last our time, won't it?"
"So would the coal and uranium."
"All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a million times without ever worrying about fuel. You can't do that on coal and uranium. Ask Multivac, if you don't believe me.
"I don't have to ask Multivac. I know that."
"Then stop running down what Multivac's done for us," said Adell, blazing up, "It did all right."
"Who says it didn't? What I say is that a sun won't last forever. That's all I'm saying. We're safe for ten billion years, but then what?" Lupow pointed a slightly shaky finger at the other. "And don't say we'll switch to another sun."
There was silence for a while. Adell put his glass to his lips only occasionally, and Lupov's eyes slowly closed. They rested.
Then Lupov's eyes snapped open. "You're thinking we'll switch to another sun when ours is done, aren't you?"
"I'm not thinking."
"Sure you are. You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one."
"I get it," said Adell. "Don't shout. When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too."
"Darn right they will," muttered Lupov. "It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it'll all have an end when all the stars run down. Some run down faster than others. Hell, the giants won't last a hundred million years. The sun will last ten billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last two hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and everything will be dark. Entropy has to increase to maximum, that's all."
"I know all about entropy," said Adell, standing on his dignity.
"The hell you do."
"I know as much as you do."
"Then you know everything's got to run down someday."
"All right. Who says they won't?"
"You did, you poor sap. You said we had all the energy we needed, forever. You said 'forever.'
It was Adell's turn to be contrary. "Maybe we can build things up again someday," he said.
"Never."
"Why not? Someday."
"Never."
"Ask Multivac."
"You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can't be done."
Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age?
Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended.
Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
"No bet," whispered Lupov. They left hurriedly.
By next morning, the two, plagued with throbbing head and cottony mouth, had forgotten the incident.

***

Jerrodd, Jerrodine, and Jerrodette I and II watched the starry picture in the visiplate change as the passage through hyperspace was completed in its non-time lapse. At once, the even powdering of stars gave way to the predominance of a single bright shining disk, the size of a marble, centered on the viewing-screen.
"That's X-23," said Jerrodd confidently. His thin hands clamped tightly behind his back and the knuckles whitened.
The little Jerrodettes, both girls, had experienced the hyperspace passage for the first time in their lives and were self-conscious over the momentary sensation of insideoutness. They buried their giggles and chased one another wildly about their mother, screaming, "We've reached X-23 -- we've reached X-23 -- we've --"
"Quiet, children." said Jerrodine sharply. "Are you sure, Jerrodd?"
"What is there to be but sure?" asked Jerrodd, glancing up at the bulge of featureless metal just under the ceiling. It ran the length of the room, disappearing through the wall at either end. It was as long as the ship.
Jerrodd scarcely knew a thing about the thick rod of metal except that it was called a Microvac, that one asked it questions if one wished; that if one did not it still had its task of guiding the ship to a preordered destination; of feeding on energies from the various Sub-galactic Power Stations; of computing the equations for the hyperspatial jumps.
Jerrodd and his family had only to wait and live in the comfortable residence quarters of the ship. Someone had once told Jerrodd that the "ac" at the end of "Microvac" stood for ''automatic computer" in ancient English, but he was on the edge of forgetting even that.
Jerrodine's eyes were moist as she watched the visiplate. "I can't help it. I feel funny about leaving Earth."
"Why, for Pete's sake?" demanded Jerrodd. "We had nothing there. We'll have everything on X-23. You won't be alone. You won't be a pioneer. There are over a million people on the planet already. Good Lord, our great-grandchildren will be looking for new worlds because X-23 will be overcrowded." Then, after a reflective pause, "I tell you, it's a lucky thing the computers worked out interstellar travel the way the race is growing."
"I know, I know," said Jerrodine miserably.
Jerrodette I said promptly, "Our Microvac is the best Microvac in the world."
"I think so, too," said Jerrodd, tousling her hair.
It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors, had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship.
Jerrodd felt uplifted, as he always did when he thought that his own personal Microvac was many times more complicated than the ancient and primitive Multivac that had first tamed the Sun, and almost as complicated as Earth's Planetarv AC (the largest) that had first solved the problem of hyperspatial travel and had made trips to the stars possible.
"So many stars, so many planets," sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. "I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now."
"Not forever," said Jerrodd, with a smile. "It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.
"What's entropy, daddy?" shrilled Jerrodette II.
"Entropy, little sweet, is just a word which means the amount of running-down of the universe. Everything runs down, you know, like your little walkie-talkie robot, remember?"
"Can't you just put in a new power-unit, like with my robot?"
"The stars are the power-units. dear. Once they're gone, there are no more power-units."
Jerrodette I at once set up a howl. "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down."
"Now look what you've done," whispered Jerrodine, exasperated.
"How was I to know it would frighten them?" Jerrodd whispered back,
"Ask the Microvac," wailed Jerrodette I. "Ask him how to turn the stars on again."
"Go ahead," said Jerrodine. "It will quiet them down." (Jerrodette II was beginning to cry, also.)
Jerrodd shrugged. "Now, now, honeys. I'll ask Microvac. Don't worry, he'll tell us."
He asked the Microvac, adding quickly, "Print the answer."
Jerrodd cupped the strip or thin cellufilm and said cheerfully, "See now, the Microvac says it will take care of everything when the time comes so don't worry."
Jerrodine said, "And now, children, it's time for bed. We'll be in our new home soon."
Jerrodd read the words on the cellufilm again before destroying it: INSUFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
He shrugged and looked at the visiplate. X-23 was just ahead.

***

VJ-23X of Lameth stared into the black depths of the three-dimensional, small-scale map of the Galaxy and said, "Are we ridiculous, I wonder in being so concerned about the matter?"
MQ-17J of Nicron shook his head. "I think not. You know the Galaxy will be filled in five years at the present rate of expansion."
Both seemed in their early twenties, both were tall and perfectly formed.
"Still," said VJ-23X, "I hesitate to submit a pessimistic report to the Galactic Council."
"I wouldn't consider any other kind of report. Stir them up a bit. We've got to stir them up."
VJ-23X sighed. "Space is infinite. A hundred billion Galaxies are there for the taking. More."
"A hundred billion is not infinite and it's getting less infinite all the time. Consider! Twenty thousand years ago, mankind first solved the problem of utilizing stellar energy, and a few centuries later, interstellar travel became possible. It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the population doubles every ten years --
VJ-23X interrupted. "We can thank immortality for that."
"Very well. Immortality exists and we have to take it into account. I admit it has its seamy side, this immortality. The Galactic AC has solved many problems for us, but in solving the problem of preventing old age and death, it has undone all its other solutions."
"Yet you wouldn't want to abandon life, I suppose."
"Not at all," snapped MQ-17J, softening it at once to, "Not yet. I'm by no means old enough. How old are you?"
"Two hundred twenty-three. And you?"
"I'm still under two hundred. --But to get back to my point. Population doubles every ten years. Once this GaIaxy is filled, we'll have filled another in ten years. Another ten years and we'll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hundred years, we'll have filled a thousand Galaxies. In a thousand years, a million Galaxies. In ten thousand years, the entire known universe. Then what?"
VJ-23X said, "As a side issue, there's a problem of transportation. I wonder how many sunpower units it will take to move Galaxies of individuals from one Galaxy to the next."
"A very good point. Already, mankind consumes two sunpower units per year."
"Most of it's wasted. After all, our own Galaxy alone pours out a thousand sunpower units a year and we only use two of those."
"Granted, but even with a hundred per cent efficiency, we only stave off the end. Our energy requirements are going up in a geometric progression even faster than our population. We'll run out of energy even sooner than we run out of Galaxies. A good point. A very good point."
"We'll just have to build new stars out of interstellar gas."
"Or out of dissipated heat?" asked MQ-17J, sarcastically.
"There may be some way to reverse entropy. We ought to ask the Galactic AC."
VJ-23X was not really serious, but MQ-17J pulled out his AC-contact from his pocket and placed it on the table before him.
"I've half a mind to," he said. "It's something the human race will have to face someday."
He stared somberly at his small AC-contact. It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind. Hyperspace considered, it was an integral part of the Galactic AC.
MQ-17J paused to wonder if someday in his immortal life he would get to see the Galactic AC. It was on a little world of its own, a spider webbing of force-beams holding the matter within which surges of submesons took the place of the old clumsy molecular valves. Yet despite its sub-etheric workings, the Galactic AC was known to be a full thousand feet across.
MQ-17J asked suddenly of his AC-contact, "Can entropy ever be reversed?"
VJ-23X looked startled and said at once, "Oh, say, I didn't really mean to have you ask that."
"Why not?"
"We both know entropy can't be reversed. You can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree."
"Do you have trees on your world?" asked MQ-17J.
The sound of the Galactic AC startled them into silence. Its voice came thin and beautiful out of the small AC-contact on the desk. It said: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
VJ-23X said, "See!"
The two men thereupon returned to the question of the report they were to make to the Galactic Council.

***

Zee Prime's mind spanned the new Galaxy with a faint interest in the countless twists of stars that powdered it. He had never seen this one before. Would he ever see them all? So many of them, each with its load of humanity. --But a load that was almost a dead weight. More and more, the real essence of men was to be found out here, in space.
Minds, not bodies! The immortal bodies remained back on the planets, in suspension over the eons. Sometimes they roused for material activity but that was growing rarer. Few new individuals were coming into existence to join the incredibly mighty throng, but what matter? There was little room in the Universe for new individuals.
Zee Prime was roused out of his reverie upon coming across the wispy tendrils of another mind.
"I am Zee Prime," said Zee Prime. "And you?"
"I am Dee Sub Wun. Your Galaxy?"
"We call it only the Galaxy. And you?"
"We call ours the same. All men call their Galaxy their Galaxy and nothing more. Why not?"
"True. Since all Galaxies are the same."
"Not all Galaxies. On one particular Galaxy the race of man must have originated. That makes it different."
Zee Prime said, "On which one?"
"I cannot say. The Universal AC would know."
"Shall we ask him? I am suddenly curious."
Zee Prime's perceptions broadened until the Galaxies themselves shrank and became a new, more diffuse powdering on a much larger background. So many hundreds of billions of them, all with their immortal beings, all carrying their load of intelligences with minds that drifted freely through space. And yet one of them was unique among them all in being the original Galaxy. One of them had, in its vague and distant past, a period when it was the only Galaxy populated by man.
Zee Prime was consumed with curiosity to see this Galaxy and he called out: "Universal AC! On which Galaxy did mankind originate?"
The Universal AC heard, for on every world and throughout space, it had its receptors ready, and each receptor led through hyperspace to some unknown point where the Universal AC kept itself aloof.
Zee Prime knew of only one man whose thoughts had penetrated within sensing distance of Universal AC, and he reported only a shining globe, two feet across, difficult to see.
"But how can that be all of Universal AC?" Zee Prime had asked.
"Most of it," had been the answer, "is in hyperspace. In what form it is there I cannot imagine."
Nor could anyone, for the day had long since passed, Zee Prime knew, when any man had any part of the making of a Universal AC. Each Universal AC designed and constructed its successor. Each, during its existence of a million years or more accumulated the necessary data to build a better and more intricate, more capable successor in which its own store of data and individuality would be submerged.
The Universal AC interrupted Zee Prime's wandering thoughts, not with words, but with guidance. Zee Prime's mentality was guided into the dim sea of Galaxies and one in particular enlarged into stars.
A thought came, infinitely distant, but infinitely clear. "THIS IS THE ORIGINAL GALAXY OF MAN."
But it was the same after all, the same as any other, and Lee Prime stifled his disappointment.
Dee Sub Wun, whose mind had accompanied the other, said suddenly, "And is one of these stars the original star of Man?"
The Universal AC said, "MAN'S ORIGINAL STAR HAS GONE NOVA. IT IS A WHITE DWARF"
"Did the men upon it die?" asked Lee Prime, startled and without thinking.
The Universal AC said, "A NEW WORLD, AS IN SUCH CASES WAS CONSTRUCTED FOR THEIR PHYSICAL BODIES IN TlME."
"Yes, of course," said Zee Prime, but a sense of loss overwhelmed him even so. His mind released its hold on the original Galaxy of Man, let it spring back and lose itself among the blurred pin points. He never wanted to see it again.
Dee Sub Wun said, "What is wrong?"
"The stars are dying. The original star is dead."
"They must all die. Why not?"
"But when all energy is gone, our bodies will finally die, and you and I with them."
"It will take billions of years."
"I do not wish it to happen even after billions of years. Universal AC! How may stars be kept from dying?"
Dee Sub Wun said in amusement, "You're asking how entropy might be reversed in direction."
And the Universal AC answered: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Zee Prime's thoughts fled back to his own Galaxy. He gave no further thought to Dee Sub Wun, whose body might be waiting on a Galaxy a trillion light-years away, or on the star next to Zee Prime's own. It didn't matter.
Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built.

***

Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.
Man said, "The Universe is dying."
Man looked about at the dimming Galaxies. The giant stars, spendthrifts, were gone long ago, back in the dimmest of the dim far past. Almost all stars were white dwarfs, fading to the end.
New stars had been built of the dust between the stars, some by natural processes, some by Man himself, and those were going, too. White dwarfs might yet be crashed together and of the mighty forces so released, new stars built, but only one star for every thousand white dwarfs destroyed, and those would come to an end, too.
Man said, "Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the energy that is even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years."
"But even so," said Man, "eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, the energy once expended is gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase forever to the maximum."
Man said, "Can entropy not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC."
The Cosmic AC surrounded them but not in space. Not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and nature no longer had meaning in any terms that Man could comprehend.
"Cosmic AC," said Man, "how may entropy be reversed?"
The Cosmic AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Man said, "Collect additional data."
The Cosmic AC said, 'I WILL DO S0. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESORS AND I HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TlMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT.
"Will there come a time," said Man, 'when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?"
The Cosmic AC said, "NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES."
Man said, "When will you have enough data to answer the question?"
The Cosmic AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
"Will you keep working on it?" asked Man.
The Cosmic AC said, "I WILL."
Man said, "We shall wait."

***

The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.
One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.
Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?"
AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Man's last mind fused and only AC existed -- and that in hyperspace.

***

Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer [technician] ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.
All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.
But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light --

Everybody knows that the plague is coming (2)

2007-03-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

On 9th of March I wrote about the "coming plague" as a euphemism for the evil that is latent in all of humanity. Today, I am reading the latest edition of New Scientist (24th March 2007) which has an article, called "The White Plague", about the emergence of a new strain of tuberculosis that is resistant to all drugs. It has been dubbed XDR-TB (Extensively Drug Resistant TB). The worst hit countries are China, India, Russia and South Africa but, it has also affected all the G8 countries (the world's wealthiest nations). The article says: "Now New Scientist has learned of the first known case of completely drug-resistant TB, in Italy." In fact, as at 12th March, 8 cases of XRD-TB have been diagnosed in Italy: 4 native Italians and 4 foreigners (from Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America), and there have been 2 deaths. For those of you who read Italian, read all about it here.

How does a bacterium become resistant to antibiotics? Years ago, it was common to hear experts claim that the overuse of antibiotics is to blame; it has been said that it is due to a kind of natural selection i.e. the use of antibiotics ensures that only the toughest bacteria survive. Then, these macho bacteria replicate and give rise to many more hardy bacteria which eventually usurp the weaker strains and an increase in resistance takes place. Although this explanation sounds plausible, it is not accurate. The truth is that sex has a lot to do with it. Just like you and I, bacteria like to have sex; birds do it, bees do it, so why not bacteria (bacterium does not live on bread alone)? Sex allows bacteria to acquire new characteristics by exchanging genes (biologically speaking, this exchange of genes is the original reason for having sex). Eventually a mutant gene will be exchanged which confers resistance to certain antibiotics; individuals with this gene will be more successful and will multiply. It has nothing to do with the overuse of antibiotics.

According to New Scientist, tuberculosis was responsible for 1 in 5 deaths in Europe from the 1600s to the 1900s, and now it's back with a vengeance. This strain of TB is difficult to diagnose and if resistant patients are not identified quickly, they can become biological time-bombs that can easily infect anybody they come in contact with. Will it wreak the same havoc as the "white plague" or will human ingenuity prevail? Humanity may win this battle, but what other plagues threaten us? New strains of bacteria and even brand new bacteria may crop up at any time and with little warning so we must be vigilant ... just like we need to be vigilant of the evil that is latent in all of humanity.

Dreams of a Spotless Mind

2007-03-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

Imagine being able to have an unpleasant part of your memory removed - a specific memory such as that of a failed relationship, or of a terrible accident. Such a scenario was depicted in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett. We still don't have have the technology to do this - in fact, we are very far from it - but, if you believe the hype in the press, there have recently been some "giant" steps toward this goal.
The paper "Synapse-specific reconsolidation of distinct fear memories in the lateral amygdala" in Nature Neuroscience (11th March 2007), tells of experiments made on rats using the drug U0126. Here is a press release:

A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact.

The study adds to our understanding of how memories are made and altered in the brain, and could help to relieve sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the fearful memories that disrupt their lives. The results are published in Nature Neuroscience.

The brain secures memories by transferring them from short-term to long-term storage, through a process called reconsolidation. It has been shown before that this process can be interrupted with drugs. But Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and his colleagues wanted to know how specific this interference was: could the transfer of one specific memory be meddled with without affecting others?

“Our concern was: would you do something really massive to their memory network?” says LeDoux.

To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones.

When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats’ memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.
Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD will be encouraged by the step forward. “These drugs would be adjuncts to therapy,” he says. “This is the future of psychiatry - neuroscience will provide tools to help it become more effective.”

Apparently, the U0126 interferes with "memory reconsolidation" - the process whereby an old memory is recalled in the brain. At the moment when a memory is retrieved, it can be updated with things that have happened since it was last stored. Unless the memory is reconsolidated, it will start to disappear. The exact mechanism of memory reconsolidation is not completely understood.

The above news article talks about experiments made on rats in a very controlled environment. If one wanted to use this drug on a human, how could it possibly be done? How would one pick and choose which memory to remove? Would the patient be isolated in an empty room and allowed to see only the feared situation before taking the medication?
Giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it is indeed possible that a specific memory can be removed, would it really be erased or does it become inaccessible but lying dormant and waiting to re-emerge at a later time ... after all, it is believed that once a memory is ensconced in the amygdala, it is there forever.

This is not the first time such research has been done; a drug called propranolol has also been tested, and even used on patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though with very limited success. Also, Joseph LeDoux (one of the scientists involved with this latest research, and the author of the excellent book "The Emotional Brain"), was a key researcher in the testing of another memory erasing drug called Anisomycin in 2004 ... again with his favourite animals, rats.

It seems that science is still very far from producing a drug that can pinpoint and remove specific negative memories, so it's probably premature to discuss the ethics of it, but it's still interesting to at least think about it. The White House's Council on Bioethics has condemned this kind of "memory removal" research because it amounts to personality modification. But Harvard Medical School has received a grant from the U.S army to start just this kind of research with the veterans of the Iraq war. So our governments are not exactly beacons of exemplary ethical thought. Such a hypothetical "specific-memory removal" drug would be a great help for victims of terror, rapes, accidents and PTSD. But, just like everything in life, once such a drug becomes available, it is liable to be abused so that even trivial everyday "bad memories" might be erased. Even negative memories can be important in a person's learning process; is it right to erase them? And what are the consequences of chemically tinkering with the brain's most important mechanism for self-preservation. i.e. fear?

But for the time being, the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind is just a distant dream - except maybe for lab rats.

Stem-cell debate

2007-03-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

Recently in Australia there has been some debate about the ethics of stem-cell cloning. At the moment, Steve Bracks (Premier of the Australian state of Victoria) is planning to introduce a bill to allow the therapeutic cloning of human embryos. As usual, the Catholic church is very vocal in its opposition to stem-cell research, with Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart leading the church's opposition to the bill. Hart says that embryonic cloning is "'always unethical' and there was 'total opposition' from the Catholic Church". Moreover, Steve Bracks is reportedly facing a backlash from his own party over this proposed bill. Although Australia is not known as a religious country, the Catholic church wields considerable political power; some of Australia's highest profile politicians are devout Catholics, and their beliefs inevitably (and, in my opinion, unfortunately) influences their policies.
Stem-cell research is already practised in India, Britain, Sweden, the US, Japan, and China, and is aimed at helping in the fight against conditions such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and spinal cord injuries, so the importance of such research is not in question. However, the ethics are in question and, since there appears to be disagreements in the community, debate is needed. Given that the stakes are high, I hope that the debate will not be stifled by the the church's political power, and that all the issues - particularly the scientific issues - can be understood and considered. I think it's simply not good enough for the church (and Christian politicians) to say things like "Stem-cell research amounts to the murder of babies" and "Catholic values are not negotiable". Some of the scientific issues that I would like to see openly debated are:

* IVF (In-vitro fertilisation) is already accepted in our society. In IVF, women are artificially induced to produce surplus eggs which are fertilised outside the body. Up to 10-12 zygotes might be produced, of which only a couple may be viable and implanted in the uterus. It is expected that only 1 or 2 will survive, so IVF involves the "murder" of embryos, yet it is already accepted in society. Why not stem-cell research?
* Placenta is an exact clone of the baby it nourishes - yes, an exact clone - yet, according to the church, the placenta is a discarded organ after delivery so there is no ethical problem with the use of stem-cells derived from the placenta. Is this logical?
* Microscopic conceptuses are regularly miscarried; these "babies" are spontaneously aborted and die for no apparent reason. Should the full force of medical science be brought to bear on this problem of spontaneous miscarriages of microscopic conceptuses at the expense of cancer research? After all, according to the church, they are humans.
* In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died from cervical cancer. After her death, and without Ms. Lacks' express permission, cervical cancer cells were taken from her and commercialised. This cell line (known as HeLa) survives to this day, and is used for cancer research. The church has no ethical problem with using adult stem-cells - they presumably have no problem with the use of the HeLa cell line for medical research - but have a problem with embryonic stem-cell. Let's discuss!

Throughout the ages, religion has shown itself to be inflexible and self-serving (not the kind of behaviour that is conducive to open debate) but, with the passage of time and the rise of scientific knowledge, religious influence and credibility has been steadily declining. Maybe there is some hope for humanity after all.

Mountains are time and seas are time

2007-03-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since I can remember, I've always wondered about the concept of time. What exactly is it, and what do we mean when we say things like "time is passing"? Is the passing of time just an illusion of our senses? Sure we can accurately measure a second or a minute, but, if time proceeds without any input from our minds, it would pass at the same pace for everybody, regardless of our situations or states of mind. But we all know that this is not the case ... people often say, "time flies when you're havin' fun" and time seems to go much slower when you're anxiously awaiting your exam results, and people often report that time seems to go in slow motion just before a car accident.

Isaac Newton, one of history's greatest ever scientists, wrote: "Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external." The Newtonian notion of universal time - a time scale that is the same for all observers anywhere in the universe - prevailed virtually unchallenged, until a humble Swiss patent clerk began thinking about it. That humble patent clerk was, of course, Albert Einstein.

In his "Special Theory of Relativity", Einstein destroyed the concept of absolute and universal time. He showed that time is flexible - it can be distorted by motion and by gravity. Each observer has his own personal scale of time that does not agree with anybody else's. For example, gravity slows down time, that is, a clock on Earth will run slower than a clock in space where the Earth's gravity is weaker. Another result of Einstein's work was to show that the constancy of the speed of light implies that a moving clock ticks more slowly than a stationary clock. The faster it goes the slower it ticks - although you'd have to be travelling extremely fast to notice the difference in ordinary clocks. If 2 observers moving relative to each other measure an event in time, they will not agree on its duration. The amount of disagreement increases with the difference in velocity between the two.

The theory of relativity rules out a universe past, present and future, so the concept of a "flow of time" doesn't really exist. Or does it? Certainly we can feel the flow of time. Moreover, the flow of time is so ingrained in our minds and culture that it must be real, right? Or are our minds playing tricks on each and every one of us?

The magazine "New Scientist" had an article "When a Second Lasts Forever" (November 1st 1997). This article talks about the so-called "brain clock": a circuit of neural activity which flows from the substantia nigra (where the neurotransmitter dopamine is produced), to the basal ganglia to the prefrontal cortex and back again to the substantia nigra. The following picture comes from the New Scientist article:

The time it takes for a dopamine-fuelled signal to complete the loop (typically 0.1 seconds) is one "tick" of the brain clock and is perceived as a single moment. If, for example, 2 events occur in 1 "moment", it will be experienced as one event. Anything that increases the amount of dopamine in the brain - for example, drugs, emotional state, even brain temperature - will speed up the brain clock and make time appear to slow down and give the impression that life is rushing by (since more events are experienced per cycle). A reduction in dopamine levels has the opposite effect. So that's it? The flow of time is simply a cycle of signals in the brain.

There is no such thing as universal time - physics and neurology tells us so. There is no "clock of ages". But, in this case, science has been pre-empted by Buddhist philosophy. Dogen, a 13th century Japanese Zen master wrote the following:

Mountains are time and seas are time. If they were not, there would be no mountains and seas. So you must not say there is no time in the immediate now of mountains and seas. If time is destroyed, mountains and seas are destroyed. If time is indestructible, mountains and seas are indestructible. Within this true Dharma, the morning star comes to appear, the Tathagata comes to appear, eyes come to appear, the holding up of the flower comes to appear. This is time. Were it not time, things would be not-so.

In other words, time and "things" cannot be separated; there is no time apart from things in the universe, so time is not a separate entity that flows inexorably forward.

Over the years, my concept of time has changed considerably, but it still remains a mystery and is something I think about a lot. I intend to write more blog entries on the subject of time, but not right now ... I simply don't have time.

Everybody knows that the plague is coming

2007-03-09T16:52:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast. (Leonard Cohen)

Every evening I hear news of more casualties - civilian and military - in Iraq. I often wonder when this senseless killing will end; when, if ever, will life return to normal in Iraq? Will the Iraqi people ever again know peace and security in their own country ... the kind of peace and security that we in Australia take for granted ?

The situation in Iraq reminds me of Albert Camus' novel "The Plague". The story of "The Plague" begins in the Algerian town of Oran, where life goes on as normal ... normal until a plague begins to strike. The first sign of the plague is when Dr. Rieux (the main character) steps on a dead rat early one morning. Soon, rats appear in their thousands, only to die. These rats carry the plague and, very soon, thousands of Oran's citizens begin to get sick and die. A sanitary squad is set up that moves the sick to the hospital and the dead to the crematorium. This is certainly a very gruesome story. In fact, the story paints an interesting picture of human nature ... the heroism, cowardice, despair, loneliness, faith and greed. In the end, the plague disappeared - almost as quickly as it appeared, and the cries of joy are heard in the town. But there is a final warning: there will always be plagues to threaten humanity, and the best we can do is to face them with honour and dignity. The following are the final words in the novel:

"To state things quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

"Plagues" have appeared throughout history; modern-day Iraq is just one example. World War II is probably the most obvious and, indeed, Camus lived through the Nazi presence in France. Others include the genocide in Rwanda and the reign of terror in 18th century France. The Plague (i.e. evil) persists and can strike at any time.
Camus probably believed that evil is an inherent part of human nature. Here is a quote from "The Plague":

"What's natural is the microbe. All the rest - health, integrity, purity (if you like) - is a product of the human will, of vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention."

In "The Plague", the rats are the carriers of the plague that can strike at any time, just as political and religious organisations can be carriers of evil; once the plague appears, there is nothing that can be done to stop it from running its course.

" ... on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."

Although some might say that humanity is the pestilence.