Home devotional unit

From Paleo-Future:



I started to analyze the function of this device. The labels on the coin slots probably changes with the setting of the faith selector -- it would not make sense to have wine, wafers and incense if you turn it to islam. On the other hand, why is there a Hare Krishna button if the device is set to catholicism? At this point my husband told me that the picture probably wasn't made with so much thought behind it that it makes sense to question it like this. Well. He's probably right. Anyway, it's fun.

About Carl Sagan and science fiction as mythmaking

Yet another chapter in the saga of Åka discovering things that probably are obvious to most people (at least most people with the same kind of interests).

Very recently I discovered Isaac Asimov as a popular science writer. Previously I have always thought about him as the very dull science fiction author -- I never really enjoyed his stories. When I picked up one of his collections of essays about science I was surprised to find it very fun to read (although I think he puts too much emphasis on how clever and special he is himself).

Now I'm beginning to discover Carl Sagan. I think he has been very important for making people interested in science, and I think it might be fun to read more by him.

Yesterday was the (second) Carl Sagan blog-a-thon. This caused me to take up Broca's Brain, which I intended to read soon, and read the essay "Science fiction -- a personal view".

The greatest human significance of science fiction may be as experiments on the future, as explorations of alternative destinies, as attempts to minimize future shock. This is part of the reason that science fiction has so wide appeal among young people: it is they who will live in the future.

When I started reading science fiction about the age of 12, i divided sf in before and after Sputnik -- it seemed significant if it was written in the space age or before it. Since so much of what I read was old, I had a very strong feeling of already living in the future (and I still often think of it this way). Carl Sagan also talks about this in the essay Wonder and Skepticism, although he experienced these things when they happened instead of reading about it later:

It's been my enormous good luck -- I was born at just the right time -- to have had, to some extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. I've been involved in the exploration of the solar system, in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhood. We actually send spacecraft to other worlds. We fly by them; we orbit them; we land on them. We design and control the robots: Tell it to dig, and it digs. Tell it to determine the chemistry of a soil sample, and it determines the chemistry. For me the continuum from childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almost seamless. It's never been, "Oh, gee, this is nothing like what I had imagined." just the opposite: It's exactly like what I imagined. And so I feel enormously fortunate.

Sometimes I think about science fiction as a collective work of building a myth of life in the new, technological world. It's the stories we use to make sense of life in a high-tech environment. How do we cope with this rapid change, and what does it mean for how we thing about who we are? Science fiction gives us new archetypes and reshapes old ones to fit with the world we experience.

I once met a young man who told me that William Gibson gave him an identity. It's not so strange. Cyberpunk gave the computer nerds something to identify with, a way of thinking of themselves as cool in their own way without giving up what they like to do.

And somewhere deep inside I think I owe Robert Heinlein for getting me on the way to want to be a scientist. I certainly wanted to be like his heroes, like Kip in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel who could repair a spacesuit, and who knew the distances of all the planets from the sun and could use it to calculate where he was.

Carl Sagan also notes (again from the essay "Science fiction", in Broca's Brain):

Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction.

Reweaving the rainbow

Physics is wonderful. Some people say that explaining things takes the magic out of them, and some might quote Keats who didn't like Newton's prism experiments (from this poem we have the expression "Unweave a rainbow"):

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.

Richard Feynman, and many others, have answered that by saying that it's really the opposite: the more you know about something, the more wonderful it is.

New York Times has a story about an MIT professor who is an online star with his video lectures on physics. I cannot see the lectures since I don't know if I have access to any program that can play Real Media files (but that might be just as well from a productivity point of view). I sort of like the quote from the lecture about rainbows:

“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”

/.../

For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.

“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.

“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”

I also sort of like the idea of a physicist being a superstar who brings physics to the iPods of the masses!

Antimatter

I just want to share a nice thing I found: How Antimatter Got into Science Fiction. It's a history of antimatter in science and in science fiction, with lots of links and illustrated with pictures of magazine and book covers.

Now I just wonder how dark matter got into science fiction.

Lucia

Today I feel far from home. Lucia day, the festival of lights.

One good thing about moving about 15 degrees south (and over the ocean) is that we get real winter but still lots of daylight. In Uppsala the sun rises at 8:40 am on December 13. It sets at 14:48. Here in southern Ontario I don't experience the winter darkness, and I'm still slightly surprised every day when I have breakfast and it's already dawn.

In the Nordic darkness we eagerly await the return of the light. Lucia is the first celebration of this. I might have some historical details wrong, but according to my understanding before the calendar reform December 13 was the morning after the longest night of the year. Therefore it has a special significance in folk lore, as we might expect. The day has the name of the Saint Lucia from Syracuse, but the celebrations and the light queen have almost nothing to do with her -- it's just a coincidence of the calendar.

In my world, a proper Lucia celebration is to stay up all night and bake saffron buns (they are yellow and shaped as symbols for the sun, heavy symbolism here) and ginger cookies, and maybe watch some movies with friends. In the early morning it's time to dress up in white gowns and carry candles and go wake people up with singing. Of course I haven't done it this way for many years, but as recently as two years ago I woke up hearing a Lucia procession in the building. They stopped on every floor and sang a couple of songs. I opened the door to my apartment and they gave me ginger snaps.

In Sweden the Lucia celebration is an almost entirely secular thing, if not outright pagan, with some small Christian decorations since it's also a celebration of the promise of Christmas coming soon. Here in a foreign country I have actually participated in a Canadian interpretation or adaptation of Lucia, which was very different. I was involved as an expert or consultant since I know the traditional song and could sing it. The rest of the ceremony was nothing like anything I have seen at home.

There was a story teller, who told a child-friendly version of the story of Saint Lucia (with most of the violence edited out). We learned that she was very brave and generous, and that here husband hated her for giving all her things to the poor and therfore turned her in to the evil emperor. Then entered the Lucia, looking just as they do at home in a white gown with a red sash and crown with candles. While I was singing she lit some candles and lanterns, and then she sang a song that is attributed to the Saint when she was in prison. Then there was a prayer for people in prison and for light in our lives. After this we moved to another room and had a "traditional Lucia breakfast". (They had no saffron in their buns, and they ate them with cheese and jam...)

The Sankta Lucia song in English and German translation.

I rediscover music

I'm really, really tired today. The combination of being responsible for detector operation for the first time (meaning that I monitor the detectors online and sometimes have to intervene and adjust things), having a social life and being a parent has resulted in a lack of sleep this week.

This is why I decided to try to get some noise in my office, to keep me awake. The post-doc I'm sharing the room with is gone for the week, and so I don't risk disturbing her. I have no music on my work computer, and the first thing to come into my head to look for was The No-Shows from the novel I'm reading at the moment: Keeping It Real by Justina Robson.

Interesting! As strange as it might seem, I had actually forgotten how energized I can be by music. I suddenly felt twice as alive, and actually managed to do something instead of just blankly staring at the computer screen. Why have I been so uninterested in music for so long? I cannot remember when I lost the habit.

The next step was to explore what other things I could find to listen to. That's the dangerous part, where lots of time can be lost. Today I think I gained more than I lost, but I'll have to watch myself there.

A long time ago I had a boss who told me that it's impossible to work while listening to music. My mentor in that work place was listening to AC/DC in his office, but my boss respected him too much to say anything about it. I can understand that music can be distracting, but whether it's good or bad for productivity must depend a lot on what you are doing and what music you are listening to. I'll probably listen to a lot more music at work in the future than I have done for the last few years.

When I'm talking about music I might as well mention that my brother has a new record out with his band.

Dark star

It's not so strange that I get some of my science news via sf blogs, but I found it amusing that I now learned about some new theory work on dark matter (my own field) from Bowing to the Future. In this post Lou Anders makes the connection between dark stars and Cthulhu:

"...the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . ." —H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Old ones or not, the idea presented in the article (well, the popular version of it -- I haven't read the real paper yet) is interesting. If the dark matter consists of particles that annihilate when they collide, as we often assume, this could mean that it prevented some of the early stars to light up. If the clumps of matter that were beginning to knot together to form stars contained lots of dark matter, the concentration of these particles would mean more dark matter annihilations, which would release energy and heat the ordinary matter. This would prevent normal stars to form, but instead there would be giant, diluted stars without fusion, glowing only in infrared, gamma rays, neutrinos and antimatter. If such dark stars still exist today we could in principle detect them.

Theoretical predictions always leave me with a somewhat impatient feeling. So how is it really? It's a lot of good thinking, but until we can test it we still don't know if it is a description of reality. I want observations! The idea will mature, there will be calculations and simulations, and some scenarios will perhaps turn out to be testable. Then someone will think of a way to build a detector or use an existing one to try to find something. This process can take decades, so I should not hold my breath...

(There is also an old sf film called Dark Star. I think I have seen it, but I have very vague memories of it.)

Irrationality in literature

I have an analytic mind. I like to take things apart and see what's inside. With this comes a tendency to see the literal meaning of statements. Add to this that I visualise very vividly when I read, that I see everything before my inner eye, and you see that I have a particular way of interpreting text.

One thing I don't always like is that I'm really, deep inside, a nitpicker and a besserwisser. In particular I instinctively dislike when people use words that have a precise definition in a more general (or perhaps metaphoric) sense. One example is the use of the word "carbohydrate" to mean "food that gives energy". I really had to bite my tongue at a breakfast buffet where a man told his friend that he really needed carbohydrates today — and loaded his plate with bacon and eggs. (There are no carbohydrates in that food, stupid, only fat and protein!) At the same time I think I should be glad that people are creative with language. It works as communication, and as long as the man doesn't think that he's talking about food chemistry it should be OK. I think. But it's wrong!

So I really have built in contradictions. My feelings tell me to be rational, my intellect tells me to allow room for human shortcuts and detours. ("My head is running standard time, my heart on moonlight saving..." Only the other way around.)

Anyway, I recently started to reflect on my reaction to metaphor and poetical descriptions. I usually see the literal meening of a metaphor at the same time as what it stands for, which is actually very nice. But the other day I encountered a sentence and just stopped. "The silent screaming of the Pullulus got louder." This doesn't make sense, it doesn't mean anything at all, I thought. "Silent screaming"? At the same time I noticed that it worked anyway, it still induced the right sort of feeling of something unnatural and bad going on. It works as communication.

I'm funny this way. It's probably obvious for most readers that a sentence doesn't need to be logically constructed, that you can convey a feeling without telling the reader straight out what the feeling should be. To me it's a great discovery, I never thought about it this way. In literature you are allowed to say things that has no logical truth value, that cannot be parsed in the regular way, and you can use this conciously to tell the reader something! (This also demonstrates something that literature can do but that doesn't work on film, which is sort of fun, too.)

"[T]he cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in the stones and to seep out of them." You could not investigate this statement scientifically, and applying a thermometer to the stones would just show that you don't get the point. Isn't it great!

Somehow I think this discovery is related to something that has been bugging me for a while. Some people argue that science fiction is better than fantasy because of "its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves", the logical structure of it and the connection to science. I don't really believe this, because I think people are clever enough and have enough imagination to use metaphor and myth as one of the ways to understand themselves and make sense of the world. In some ways and in some situations it might be better and more useful than the logical and analytical angle. We probably need both, just because we are humans and work that way.

But on the other hand, we could actually work backwards and use the human reactions to literature to learn something about how we are wired. There is a literature professor, Jonathan Gotschall, who wants to reinvent literary criticism this way (scroll to the bottom):

[T]he field is awash with irrational thought, he says, largely because most literature scholars believe that the humanities and science are distinct. As a result, literary theorists rely on opinion and conjecture, rather than trying to find solid, empirical evidence for their claims, he says. By adding an element of scientific thought to literary criticism, Gottschall says, we could unearth hidden truths about human nature and behaviour.

If he does the research and writes a book, I will want to read it.

(The book quotes are from Wizards at War by Diane Duane and Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke.)

God wrote the rocks

The first time I encountered young earth creationists (and in fact any kind of creationism) was when the "school evangelists" in my high school (gymnasium) distributed booklets with the title "Are there any signs that God might exist?". It contained the things I now know all too well: flood geology, arguments about the lack of intermediate stages in evolution of species, stories about dinosaurs living together with humans... you have probably heard of it. I was shocked, and slightly offended. Did they really think they could convert anyone with this stupid stuff? It had nothing to do with the question of the existence of God as I understood it. And it was a silly way of reading the bible.

A few years ago I made a serious attempt at understanding how creationists think, why they think it's so important to stick to this idea. It was difficult to ask the right questions, but the impression I got whas that they (those I talked to on the internet, they were all Swedish) didn't really think that it was a very important question at all, but they found the idea of direct creation more attractive than the idea of indirect creation and evolution. It's probably just the internal culture in their churches, how they are used to talk about things.

I find this annoying, since to me it seems that they just decide not to think about how we learn and understand things about nature and therefore they sort of miss the point. I don't think they are any less rational than any of us, only much less empirically inclined. Reason seems to be important to them, but investigating and evaluating the physical world is not. (Remember, this is my interpretation of the creationists I've been talking to, I'm sure there are all kinds of them.) You can do all sorts of reasoning and be extremely cerebral without going out to see the evidence, and then you also end up with all sorts of conclusions which are not necessarily related to what the world really is like.

As you might have noticed, the discussions about the credibility of evolution now ended up to be about the role of science in society -- as we can also see from the incredibly infected (and stupid) debate in the US. I can not come to any other conclusion that this whole thing hurts both sides, research and religion, by focussing the attention on the wrong things. I recently noted that some churches have initiated an "evolution weekend" next year. This is probably a good thing.

In the end, the best answer I've found to creationists is still the filk song Word of God by Catherine Faber (follow the link for the complete lyrics):

Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

It can be downloaded from The Virtual Filksing, performed by Kathy Mar. (I have the CD. There is also a beautiful neopagan song about fire, water and smoke -- this always makes me smile and think about the candles, holy water and incense generously used in a church (Lutheran!) I know in Uppsala.)

By the way, if you are interested it might be worth taking a look at what Dr. James F. McGrath has to say on the topic of creationism. Or about intelligent design:
An Immoral Godless Pseudoscience.