WEIRD SCIENCE NEWS
Weird Science News may be oxymoronic to most. After all, most science is weird to those outside the Ivory Tower. It’s the aim of Weird Science News to change that. In this age of the internet weird science becomes wonderful, hypothesis becomes hope and myth becomes matter-of-fact with just few mouse clicks.
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Will Dolphins Talk to Humans?
Not once they know us. 09.27.11 
A NY Times Article out last week asked: How Far Will Dolphins Go to Relate to Humans? Reading this article has NBN asking: How far will humans go to relate to dolphins? The scientist in the article spent the past 25 years trying to answer the first question with help from various charities. Now, in these tough economic times with a Congress suddenly critical of all scientific effort, NBN has to wonder how much longer will this dolphin outreach effort, called the Wild Dolphin Project, last in a country where everybody is broke. Fortunately for the Dolphin Project the U.S. government can’t tell charities what they can do with their money. But two public universities are collaborating with the Dolphin Project. According to the article, the woman leading the Dolphin Project spends the bulk of her day diving in remote parts of the Bahamas videotaping dolphins then analyzing the tape in the confines of her 65-foot research sailboat. All to find a way to communicate with dolphins and to see if dolphins will then want to communicate with humans. NBN can tell from our own experience: dolphins will reach out to humans.
Once, while ladling fish guts into a shark chum slick 40 miles off the coast of Long Island, NBN scientists happened upon an enormous pod of dolphins swimming 50 years off the stern of our 25-foot “research vessel.” The animals took a distinct right turn when they spied us and swam right past our boat. They came within inches of our gunnels and turned sideways to look up at us. There was no mistaking it. The dolphins were checking us out. So why does the project need to spend what must be well over a couple million dollars by now to learn to what extent dolphins will attempt to reach out to us if they have a means of doing so?
Unfortunately, to answer that question NBN can only offer a lot more questions and a few sad scenarios. First, why did we spend $1 trillion over in Iraq, taking the lives of 4,000 U.S. citizens and who knows how many Iraqis along the way? Given what’s happening in the other Middle East countries these days, it’s increasingly clear those 4,000 died, and thousands more were maimed, for little other reason than they were willing to make such sacrifices for such dubious reasons in a world where there’s no shortage of unscrupulous people willing to take advantage of a toxic mix of patriotism and hormonal excess. On the other hand, what benefit will come of finding out that dolphins, if given a means of communication, would reach out to humans? Should we find out what warm, wonderful creatures they really are maybe we can become even more upset over videos of Japanese slaughtering dolphins. It’s hardly likely that we’ll institute more stringent pollutions controls on behalf of dolphins once we find out what great conversationalists they are. That has NBN asking yet another question: Are these equally foolish endeavors? NBN loves science, so you know our answer: We’d love to hear yours.
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Born to Run? Or Lounge 09.06.11
Anyone who has read Christopher McDougall’s book “Born To Run” doesn’t need to read this article. However, if you don’t have the time for McDougall’s slightly aggravating mix of occasionally hilarious writing with tedious scientific text, this NYTimes piece is an excellent distillation of eye-opening research into key aspects of human evolution. (That’s, assuming you believe that whole Darwin thing.) Please don’t take this critique as a pan of McDougall’s book. He does a great job researching the relatively recent ultramarathon craze to support a theory advanced by Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman.
It’s Lieberman’s contention, cited in both McDougall’s book and NYTimes article linked above, that human’s are unique in the animal world for our ability to run for hours on end. Once we started standing on two feet, it was a game-changer as far as our ability to run and breath at the same time. It enabled early humans to literally out-run antelopes and such which need to rest more often to keep running. All that great antelope meat that early humans were running down is what fueled the development of our big brains. So now we run around in cars and sit in front of computers all day. Sadly, all this inactivity runs completely counter to what our bodies, its physiology and metabolism, are designed to do.
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So humans these days have all kinds of illnesses—fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes, back trouble and bad teeth—resulting from this mismatch between what humans evolved to be and what our big brains have allowed us to become.
NBNs Evolutionary Trend
Which brings us to the question: Why are you reading this? Because even more recent research is suggesting something big is missing in Leiberman’s theory and NBN thinks we found it in this really well-done article by Matt Fitzgerald suggesting not all of us are born to run. Certainly the fusiform body shape—a.k.a. the Bobo Doll design—found on the staff at NBN predisposes them to sitting for days on end in front of computers. But doesn’t modern archeology say we all evolved, NBN included, from those lean mean running machines found in the African savannah. Isn’t that where we all came from? Somehow, in what’s believed to be 130,000 years humans have been on the earth, we’ve evolved from tree swinging apes, to running machines to couch potatoes. NBN thinks that’s a little too much evolution a little too quickly for Darwin’s theory to account for. Which brings us to the only original thought NBN has on this subject.
Maybe evolution doesn’t happen quite as slowly as most of science thinks it does. We’d like to propose NBN’s Theory of Perceptual Evolution. This is distinct from Darwin’s idea that evolution is guided by random changes in our DNA that every few thousand years produces physiological changes that makes one more fit to survive. No, NBN’s Theory of Perceptual Evolution suggests that what an animal, sees, tastes, hears and feels helps guide our DNA toward physiological changes that make a species more adapt for their immediate surroundings. In other words we learn from what we see, hear taste and feel around us and that learning is through some mysterious process incorporated into our DNA. That’s sort of what Fitzgerald’s piece linked above is driving at. Yes, we know it’s completely without scientific support. That’s what we told about 30 years ago in the evolutionary biology department at Stony Brook University by the brilliant, if bad-breathed, Emil Menzel. But we still like the idea, and Perceptual Evolution may sit a little better with those folks who think evolution in any form is heresy. Sadly, political evolution seems to be favoring those folks these days.
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Weird Science Is Not Always So 06.21.11
$1.5m for a really slow, towel-folding robot? $500k to teach shrimp to run a treadmill? $300k to study interpersonal relationships formed through the Facebook game Farmville? Sen. Tom I-love-oil-I-hate-science Coburn singled out all the above to bolster his argument that the National Science Foundation, which funded these projects, should get a lot less money. This is Coburn’s annual pilgrimage to the political platitudes trough to fish out and flout absurdities in government spending.The point we’d like to make is: sure the items in the YouTube sound absurd at first blush. However, can anyone doubt that further investigation would find good reasons for each. The shrimp treadmill might have ramifications for shrimp farming.
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Do you think the poor workers wading around in the radioactive waters in the failed Japanese nukes would think ANY money spent advancing robotics is wasted? And given the huge role social media is just starting to play in our daily lives, who knows what might come of the research into the online farming game. Let’s face it folks, the National Science Foundation wades through dozens of applications to select just one for every grant they dispense. The application process is comprehensive, to say the least. The competition is fierce and projects with no discernible use to humanity don’t win.
Coburn: A perennial profile in political pandering
Politicians with no discernible us to humanity do win political points by misrepresenting these grant projects in poorly researched studies like the one that Coburn commissioned and Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos turned into the YouTube above. Us less educated folks love to make jokes about science we don't understand. It's a lot easier than trying to understand it. But there’s nothing funny about shameless politicians taking cheap shots at science for their own political gain. What are the chances Coburn read a single application for the grants he went onto question? Yet you don’t hear Coburn saying anything bad about the tax money spent on oil company subsidies which he continues to support.
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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Quantum Computing 05.31.11
Today NBN boldly goes where no sensible former construction company would dare to go: into the interface of science and religion as teased apart by a bewildering article that ran in the New Yorker three weeks back. The article starts harmlessly enough with this headline and drophead. Dream Machine: The mind-expanding world of quantum computing. But it takes the author only four sentences to serve up this mental mind blower: “With one millionth of the hardware of an ordinary laptop, a quantum computer could store as many bits of information as there are particles in the universe.” That’s just the beginning of the head scratching. In an effort to save your scalp—and probably do inexcusable damage to the real message of this article—NBN is going to attempt to explain some of the most salient points. The first of them being: anybody thinking that life is just what we see and experience on planet earth is dead wrong.
This article holds out all kinds of hope for those of us really bummed that this wonderful, wonderful experience we call life comes so cruelly and pointlessly to a close at some point. It’s like going to a party so great you almost don’t want to bother because you know it has to end. So NBN, like so many of us, scour our own life experiences and scientific publications for any signs of a life other than the obvious. This New Yorker article is the closest thing we’ve found yet. It revolves around the idea that for every “thing” in this world there has to be another “thing” in another world. Before you go saying that Star Trek covered this subject fully in the “Let That be Your Last Battlefield” episode, here’s another bomb-shell from the article: computers are being made right now that can somehow reach into this nether world. They are called quantum computers.
When Atoms get together predictions can be made.
In some respects quantum computers differ from regular computers in the simplest of measures. Where regular computers use endless supplies of zeros and ones to catalog—and subsequently pick apart—the entire world, the quantum computer uses one more key component: the zero or one. Hang in there for just another moment while we jump from quantum computers to quantum mechanics to attempt some sort of explanation here. Quantum mechanics is the theory that every “thing” is comprised of atoms which are comprised of electrons that orbit little collections of particles called the nucleus. Most "things" are made up of different kinds of atoms bound together through the orbits of their electrons which sort of spin around their own nuclei as well as the nuclei of their partner. This is high school chemistry.
This kind of is what a quantum copumpter is. Weird and exciting.
This interaction between atoms means you can use one atom to predict to a limited extent what the other is doing. This is where quantum mechanics meet quantum computers and our grasp of this subject starts to slip. But, here goes anyway. Quantum computers use the same predictive model of quantum mechanics and apply it to the zero or one component mentioned above. In other words—we think—you use the zero or one as a predictor or forecasting tool to arrive at an answer or calculation you’ve tasked your quantum computer with. The article says there is such a computer and that it can predict the outcome of three card monte 80 percent of the time. For real! That’s all folks. We don’t dare attempt further explanation other than to suggest you read the article. At the very least, it gives us a lot to think about the next time we’re thinking: Is that all there is? And yes, NBN was once a construction company.
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Tree of Life Gets Big New Branch
But No One Know Its Reach 04.12.11
But No One Know Its Reach 04.12.11
The Tree of Life. Is there another branch?
If this isn’t weird science we don’t know what is: Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees. What this means is: studying evolution, not through the fossils of long-dead animals but through the DNA of living ones. This takes a little work to get your mind around. If we know a certain sequence of DNA can be attributed to a part of an animal’s body or behavior that evolved recently—like walking upright or having a big brain—then, in theory scientists can use chromosomes to trace back through time older body parts and behaviors. So we no longer need fossils to figure out the tree of life, it can be mapped from chromosomes. Evolution is no longer a theory, it can be seen in this chronology of chromosomes. Put another way, scientists can find tn human chromosomes, the DNA that belonged to the single-celled animal that humans evolved from. What’s more interesting still about this paper is they might have uncovered a new form of life. Without getting too technical, all life can be broken down into three different cell types because all life came from single cells.
Until Now Three Different Cell Types Comprised All Life. Is there a fourth?
One of these cell types is, eukaryotes, which makes up all living multi-cellular plants and animal. Bacteria and something called archaea, are single-cell organism that make up the other two life forms. DNA from all three can be found in all animal and plant life forms, including humans. However, in mapping the chronology of these chromosomes the author found chromosomes not found in any of the known three cell forms. Is this a new form of life we know nothing about?
If we’re to read into the five paragraphs of this study that we actually understood, further study is needed to see if these odd chromosomes really are from an unknown life form. If they are, no one is really sure what the discovery will mean in terms of benefit, or danger, to humanity. So why do we raise it here? Genetics are becoming a driver in medical, agricultural and energy research. If there is another life form that’s built into our DNA it might be nice to know before these folks start stringing together chromosomes hoping to find a fatter, faster-growing fish to fry, lest circa 1950s B-movies start becoming prescient forecasts of future events.
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Australian's Invasive Cane Toad
Evolution by Other Means 03.29.11
In the 07.07.10 Biodiversity News, NBN said that in a human-run world, evolution is more about survival of the fastest to adapt to ever-changing ecological conditions than it is about survival of the fittest in existing conditions. Well, we finally found an article that agrees with us. The subject is an invasive species called the cane toad, brought into Australia 60 years ago to combat beetles ravaging sugar cane fields. The article says the cane toad has spread like kudzu across the continent in search of something that doesn’t fit in the standard laws of Darwinian evolution. It seems the toads are more focused on finding new places to live than actually living in those places once they are found. The article suggests that if the toads stayed put in some of those new places and focused more on making little toads, each toad might have more babies survive. That, according to Darwin, is what everything lives for. So why move?
These toads seem driven by something other than making babies. For them, success is measured by being first to exploit a new place to live. This is where the article gets a little tricky. Being first to exploit a new place to live often goes hand-in-hand with making lots of babies: if you’re first on the scene you get everything to yourself. But why risk leaving an area where there are more than enough resources to share to search for a place where you don’t have to share anything? Are these toads forsaking two birds in the hand, hoping (hopping?) there are three in the bush? Or, is it more important to these toads to know there are no competitors for the resources they do eventually find? As the article notes, those opting for the three-in-the-bush prospect may be having fewer babies as a result.
The Atlantic tomcod has evolved to resist pollution.
A better question might be: who cares? If you care about commercial fishing, farming, pestilence, plague and keeping things like cane toads out of your pantry, you should. Humans are altering the planet’s ecosystems so dramatically, that standards rules of evolution do not apply anymore. Odd, quirky things—like passing up food in the hopes of getting more food—are driving evolution. Again: why care? If nothing else, it's another argument to consider when weighing whether or not to spray a wetland for mosquitoes, or fund endangered species programs, or pull dams from rivers to restore natural fish migrations. We have no idea what’s going to evolve out of the mess we’re making of this place.
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The Ultimate Green Energy: Tree Power
And We Ain't Talking Fire Wood 1.18.11
Imagine it’s 20 degrees on a January, 2007, morning and you’re driving along a Boston backstreet outside the MIT campus. You spy a half dozen people pounding what looks like a copper sword into the frozen ground and wiring it to a nail in the tree. They are clearly freezing to death as they pull and reinsert the sword and nail at various lengths apart and periodically peer into the lens of an electronic device wired to both. Imagine further that it’s 2 in the morning in 2016. You’re sleeping soundly at a Motel 6 somewhere outside Challis, ID, and a lightning bolt deep in the Potato State’s wilderness sparks a wild fire heading straight for the hotel. The ensuing flames are snuffed out by the US Forestry service which was alerted within minutes by a nationwide network of environmental sensors powered by a faint electrical current generated by trees. You turn over in your sway-back mattress none the wiser.
Now ask yourself, or better yet, ask Joe the unemployed plumber, should those frozen maniacs with the hammer and copper sword been given the grant money needed to pursue the prospects that trees can power a nationwide-network of outdoor fire alarms? The answer will very likely depend on where in the time line of the decade of development behind this system the grant money was sought. The fire alarms seem worth the funding, but the science experiment wiring the trees sounds like a harder sell. Would private industry fund such crazy research? Yet, if you don’t fund the tree experiment you don't get to the fire alarms that saved the Motel 6.
NBN was there that frigid January morning and has watched from the sidelines as MagCap Engineering has developed a sister company called Voltree now making those fire alarms, shown at left. To our knowledge Voltree has not received grants directly supporting its research, but grants have been applied toward testing it. Now, we have a new government bent on cutting spending and that’s good. But where do you think they are going to start cutting first? Here’s a clue. Yesterday the federal government announced $4.6 billion for new fighter jets. Smokey the bear is right: only we can prevent forest fires. But will we? To learn more about Voltree, check out this video.
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Does Exercise+Evolution=Eternity? 01.11.11
Science has pretty clearly established that sitting on the couch, eating Big Macs and/or bon bons, drinking beer and/or Cosmos and watching TV is not good for you. But a recent flurry of news and an extraordinary bestseller called Born to Run has NBN now thinking it's qualified to give you a fresh assessment of how bad such a lifestyle is for you. Let's start with this Wall Street Journal article citing a recent study that says Alzheimer's results from reduced recycling in brain cells. A tiny organ in cells called lysosomes that brake down complex proteins into smaller cell building blocks are not getting the job done in older folks. What is the one thing that most old folks share in common? They tend to not get a lot of exercise. Ok, let’s put the old folks’ lysosomes on the back burner for a moment.
Next, we have the brilliant the book Born to Run. It says that as human brains grew larger our energy demands could only be met with lots of meat. Thus humans developed the extraordinary hunting skill of running down much faster prey like gazelles and antelope. Not by being faster, but being persistent. Running on two feet rather than four allowed humans to run for hours on end after animals that have to catch their breath after short, intense bursts of speed. Mind blowing stuff, and the books makes the case brilliantly.
Running is pretty much what humans did all day, every day. It played a central role in our evolution. Taken another way, the hopelessly sedentary life these big brains have brought us to is the opposite of what our biochemistry and metabolism are designed to do. Look at this video on persistence hunting above and then imagine yourself running for eight hours to catch a Kudu. It may seem impossible, but it’s what your body is designed to do. However our big brains eventually enabled to invent guns, treestands and thermoses. That’s how we went from the guy in the video this fellow here |
Which brings us back to old folks and this New York Times Magazine article, we cited a few weeks back from which we pulled this excerpt: Two recent studies involving middle-aged runners suggest that the serious mileage they were putting in, over years and years, had protected them at the chromosomal level. It appears that exercise may stimulate the production of telomerase, an enzyme that maintains and repairs the little caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep genetic information intact when cells divide. That may explain why older athletes aren’t just more cardiovascularly fit than their sedentary counterparts — they are more free of age-related illness in general. Now for a little reckless speculation: What if serious exercise also gives the lysosomes mentioned in the WSJ article a little nudge?
Where does this leave us. NBN wants to cite all the above to suggest that, if we stopped gobbling all the crap folks like Kraft and Nestle have made billions selling us, and if we put down the keys to the jet skies and picked up a pair of hiking boot, or running shoes, human life expectancy would sky-rocket and health costs would plummet. A while back NBN dared to ask if humans could live forever. That may be a stretch, but increasingly, it’s becoming clear that we could live a lot longer than we do, should we choose to. We’re not talking adding 10 or 15 years to your life, but 20 or 30 or more, depending on how much exercise you get. As the brilliant podiatrist/aspiring nutritionist Dr. Felix Palmiri once said: Exercise is the answer to everything. NBN wants to thank “Today's Cartoon by Randy Glasbergen” which provided special permission to display this cartoon. For many more cartoons please visit Randy's website at www.glasbergen.com Thanks Randy! Your cartoons are great.
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An Ethological Explanation of War 10.26.10
Unbeknownst to pretty much anyone who likes handguns or has watched the movie Platoon more than twice, there’s an area of psychology called ethology which examines the evolution of behavior. To put this ivory tower discipline into a Kansas City milkman perspective, the latest hot ethology news suggests penguins are not really gay, just lonely. Hardly MSM. Ethologists often argue even the noblest human endeavors can result from elemental orders issued by our DNA. Thus NBN’s suggestion above, that ethology is not a widely circulated concept with the give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death crowd. So, imagine our surprise when this piece on the subject popped up in the New York Times this weekend. In bewildering sentences characteristic of the science, the piece attempts to explain in survival-of-the-fittest terms a central study of ethology called altruism: helping others at one’s own expense. The Times’ story proposes that, as altruistic as some people can appear to us, their actions can be traced to some self-preserving motive.
The piece makes no mention of what’s arguably altruism personified: young soldiers. How do you explain an 18 year-old Arkansas farm boy abandoning the protective iron hull of a WWII landing craft to charge into a hail of bullets with 135,000 others just like him. What could possibly make that boy think his ultimate sacrifice is anything but an insignificant increment in one of dozens of similar clashes that make up history. Ditto for the Muslim martyr. As Middle East refugee camps are wall papered with images of 18-year-olds who turned themselves into bomb casings, one might think new recruits may see the significance of their actions somewhat diluted.
How do ethologists explain this? They don’t. Not completely. So, we thought we’d cobble together our own theory. We think young soldiers are proof that what looks like, and we often praise as, the highest form of altruism is an unfortunate alloy of the purest of motives, tragic tradition; an alchemy of ambition, economics and politics, all topped off with individual judgment clouded by raging hormones and a very vulnerable intellect. The last is the most importent ingredient. Wars wouldn’t happen were it not for children that suddenly find themselves in an adult’s body. Both physically and intellectually, many 18 year-olds are often not up to the task. |
They are tailor made for middle-aged men with visions of a better world and the inexplicable ability to overlook massive personal gains as they pursue those visions. Like the name suggests, parasitism is a behavioral adaptation that prompts a European Cuckoo to clear another nest’s eggs to make room for their own, as in the video above. An ethologist might also argue parasitism is what prompted these folks here to direct children from several thousand other families to kill each other over land with only one redeeming asset: oil and/or access to it. However, the political ambition/parasitism theory of warfare falls short when applied to WWII and, possibly, the Civil War.
Ethology can only explain war through a vaguer theory called commensalism: That’s behavior where everybody benefits. The idealistic young man or woman finds a widely respected outlet for their boundless energy that simultaneously silences their burgeoning intellects through a pledge of unquestioning allegiance and an onslaught of atta-boys. Ambitious politicians have a potent force to further their often self serving visions of widely held values: The more popular the interpretation, the more potent the force the more powerful the politician. You don’t need to be an ethologist to see that commensalism, not altruism, explains young men and women with compromised judgment lining up to make the ultimate sacrifice for people with compromised morals. Which is why we roundly endorse Wikileaks for showing us this week that’s exactly what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are.
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Abu-Dhabi-Doo
MIT Makes Cartoon of Crucial Science 09.28.10
Anyone who has spent any time in an editorial staff meeting knows selecting news stories can be a Byzantine process. Still, that doesn’t quite explain the Sunday NYTimes’ lead piece about the foibles of a brand new, energy efficient Abu Dhabi city called Masdar. Newswise this story compares with Lindsay Lohan’s latest shinanigans. Message wise, it’s another matter. Masdar is as much planned city as it is laboratory for MIT architects and engineers. The Times spent 50 inches and precious Page 1 newsspace bemoaning the fact it’s a gated community that does little to promote its innovative environmental message among the general public where they might do more good. This is an artists rendering of an as-yet unfinished part of Masdar.
What the NYTimes left out of its piece are all the problems Masdar is having meeting its ambitious environmental goals, as outlined in this Greentech solar piece. Sandstorms reduce the solar power plant production by 40 percent: Although they say Abu Dhabi’s abundant sunshine more than makes up for that. Still, much of Masdar’s electricity will have to be imported despite the emphasis on self sufficiency. They’ve also had high managerial turnover as the project has progressed and these public-access electric cars shown here, which the Times made such a fuss over, will now not access all points in the city.
So why are we writing about? The Greentech Solar article notes that Abu Dhabi oil money can easily cover Masdar’s $22 billion construction costs. So, who cares if Masdar is a disaster, Abu Dhabi has the dough and who can blame MIT for taking advantage of that oil wealth to conduct research that may face more fiscal scrutiny with its board of trustees if undertaken back here in the states. That’s not what’s bothersome about Masdar. It’s that MIT’s campus is in the middle of the largest surplus of vacant mill buildings in the country. These buildings are all over New England, they are already hooked up to municipal utilities and in populations centers increasingly in need of the civil engineering genius MIT is lavishing on Masdar. We don’t mean to be such hard cases about MIT’s engineering dalliances abroad, but we have to ask: What kind of signal does Masdar send at a time when this planet call ill-afford mixed signals? Particularly when Masdar seems to be having such trouble. Needless to say when The Times piece ran everyone else jumped all over the story. Once the Times says something is a story then those editorial staff meeting decisions become a little easier to make.
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Free Thinking Befuddles Computers 09.07.10
OK! Time to recklessly stray into a science we’re completely unqualified to comment on. Two weeks back we came upon this piece about problem solving in the NYTimes. The “nut graph” that attempts to explain this collision of math and the mundane is as follows: “P versus NP has enormous practical and economic importance, because modern cryptography is based on the assumption, which is workable so far, that P does not equal NP. In other words, there are problems that are impossible for computers to solve, but for which the solutions are easily recognizable. If these problems were shown to be solvable, that could undermine modern cryptography, which could paralyze electronic commerce and digital privacy because transactions would no longer be secure.”
If you can make sense from that bewildering speedbump the editors inexplicably wedged into the story, you can stop reading this and stay with the link. However, if you enjoy reckless scientific speculation as much as we do, we want to propose the Rainman hypothesis to solving P versus NP. Or, if you prefer, just call it: thinking outside the box. The Rainman link shows Raymond extracting the spilled number of toothpicks from some nebulous neural pathways his illness allows only him to tap. That’s “P versus NP”, as near as we can figure from this article: connecting previously unconnected, possibly far reaching, bits of information to produce solutions more deliberate deduction might overlook.
Why do we bring it up here. First, because it’s a really cool problem, worth spending a few minutes pondering. Second, the internet provides this very sort of opportunity on an ever expanding scale. With so many sources, expert and not, posting their life experiences and information on the internet, the ability to connect those little bits into new insights may prove a source for scientific advance no computer could ever come up with. This is pretty much what we do here at NBN: we canvas all corners of the internet to back up wild theories which are usually shot to shinola when some other article is written on the theory three days later. Speaking of while theories, Wikipedia came up with this about the emergence of “shinola” in the American lexicon of metaphors.
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Time Travel for Beginners 05.11.10
Anybody who opens a webpage called weird science deserves what they get and right now you're going to get some pretty strange stuff compliments of Dr. Stephen Hawkin. Let's start with a sentence from this article by Hawkins on the possibility of time travel. He says: “I believe things can't make themselves impossible.” (Editor's note) For those not afflicted with adult ADHD save yourself the aggravation of this NBN article and just read the Hawking piece. For a physicist the guy can write. For those of us requiring poor puns, alliteration, anecdote and humorous hyperlinks to chew through such weighty material, below is my own translation of Hawking's cosmic genius into Joe-the-plumberese. Still reading? Great!
Back to the things that can't make themselves impossible. We're going to jump into the middle of Hawking's article using that sentence as a segue. He said it to explain why time travel to the past is impossible. If it was possible you could travel back in time, shoot yourself and then where would you be? Hawking called that a paradox and as such, he said, it can't happen. We desperately hope he's right because this subject has come up before. When gremlins were plaguing the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland this article appeared suggesting construction on the space-age speedway was being tripped up by unseen powers traveling back in time to prevent the end of the world. The theory being: if the CERN accelerator were ever to work, it would produce a blackhole that would swallow the earth. This gets back to the idea of things can't make themselves impossible. In other words: we couldn't blow up the planet even if we wanted to.
We'll leave the “why nots” for another time along with the other really good reasons Hawking provided for why we can't time travel to the past. What we want to talk about, and what Hawking says is entirely possible, is time travel to the future. Everyone has heard that the faster you travel the slower times goes. Hawking does an excellent job of explaining how this is possible. He makes the Holy Grail of time travel, living much longer lives, seem tantalizingly tangible. What we want to do now, is examine if the same is possible without an enormous space ship that takes five years to reach top speed, as Hawking suggests is needed for successful time travel. Warning, long personal anecdote approaching. Make that two, long personal anecdotes approaching.
Back in the days of disco and pinball, I was chatting with a buddy at a dinner party where alcohol was not the only item on the menu. We were delving into deep discussions when I asked him this: Does time appear to speed up or slow down with accomplishment? Phrased another way, does time fly faster when your having fun or doing your homework, watching TV or writing brilliant articles. His answer: time goes faster with the more you accomplish in that time. My answer; just the opposite.
Before you scratch you head like my buddy did, consider another anecdote, from my oldest brother. When he was a young teen he took the time to explain to me--an eight-year-old—a time theory of his own. At that age Magilla Gorilla was as important to me as the passage of time. In fact, Magilla Gorilla often marked the passage of time. But his theory has stuck with me for decades and has loomed more prominent with the passage of time. His theory is this: every day of your life is shorter than the day before because it makes up a smaller percentage of your life.
Before you scratch you head like my buddy did, consider another anecdote, from my oldest brother. When he was a young teen he took the time to explain to me--an eight-year-old—a time theory of his own. At that age Magilla Gorilla was as important to me as the passage of time. In fact, Magilla Gorilla often marked the passage of time. But his theory has stuck with me for decades and has loomed more prominent with the passage of time. His theory is this: every day of your life is shorter than the day before because it makes up a smaller percentage of your life.
Still reading? Then you might be asking: What does the first anecdote have to do with the second? For that answer we need to look at the longest day of your life, your first true birthday. That's the day you come into the world and start taking everything in. (You could argue time in the womb is time served here on earth, but we're working from the day you're born because we think that's when the learning really begins.) Here's where this gets tricky. I mentioned above the relationship between time and accomplishment. For the sake of argument, lets change that to time and learning. So learning is our measure of accomplishment. Look at the eyes on this kid. He's taking everything in. Is it fair to say that you learn at least as much, if not more, on the day you are born than any other day of your life?
So what the hell does that have to do with Hawking's talk about time travel? We're not sure. But maybe you don't need a great big ship to slow time down.
So what the hell does that have to do with Hawking's talk about time travel? We're not sure. But maybe you don't need a great big ship to slow time down.
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