Interna

This weekend, I'll be on my way back to Sweden. My time here at Perimeter Institute turned out to be busier than expected, but it has also been very productive. It is somewhat sad that every time I come back more people I knew have left. Those postdocs who I spent my years with here have either left already, sit on packed bags about to start a new job, or are due to apply for a new job this fall.

The weather here in Waterloo has been brilliant the last two weeks, and the construction at PI has proceeded rapidly. On the risk of boring you to death, here's more photos of the building extension. Meanwhile, one can imagine how the result will look. The photo below is from the back of the building. To the right, you see the old part of the building, the glass boxes are the researchers' offices.

This is a close-up of the new part of the building, with the goldish shimmering glass front:



And this is again the view from the parking lot, compare to three weeks ago. If I recall correctly, that's where the new main entrance will be.



So, now I have to pack my bag. You'll hear from me once I'm back in Stockholm. Meanwhile, a great weekend to all of you!

Learning to deal with information

In the 21st century, information is cheap. Or is it? I have written several times on this blog that it is a naive illusion to think of the internet as a democratic provider of information. Moreover, the simple provision of information is not equivalent to people being well informed.

The availability of information on the internet is not democratic but, if anything, anarcho-capitalist. If you have the money to pay people who know something about search engine optimization, and others to spam links to your site wherever they won't be immediately deleted, you can pimp up your website's ranking dramatically. Even Google's PageRank algorithm itself is clearly not democratic: it gives more weight to a link from a site that has itself more links. That's what makes it so powerful and so useful. Sure, we all profit from this clever ordering of information. I'm certainly not complaining about it. It's just not democratic and shouldn't be sold as democratic since not everybody's voice has the same weight. Google itself does smartly not call the algorithm itself "democratic" but writes that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web." Ohm, which democratic nature are we talking about again? But maybe more important, Google's PageRank also doesn't tell you anything about the quality of information you obtain. That the voices of the wealthy have more impact is hardly surprising, and merely a reflection of what has been going on in the media and news press for a long time.

Now one could of course argue that it's up to me to just go through all the hits that my search brought up and find the best piece of information. But as a matter of fact, most people don't do that. I usually don't do it either. And that's not even irrational, because scanning through all the hits that one gets on a query is very time-intensive and the result rarely justifies the effort. Thus, most people will skim maybe the first 20 hits, if at all, and conclude that they've gotten a fair cross-section of what there is to know about the topic. That's the part of the information that is "cheap." Everything else, for example checking sources, becomes increasingly costly in terms of time and effort. And since most websites don't list their sources, there's few shortcuts to that. What is left is that whoever dominates the "cheap" information does, for all practical purposes, dominate the information market. The only cure for that is information literacy.

The other day, I read an interesting article by Mark Moran. Moran is CEO of a Web publisher that offers free content and tools that teach students how to use the Web effectively. He writes:

"[A]s the founder of a company whose mission is to teach the effective use of the Internet, I have pored through dozens of studies, and recently oversaw one myself, that all came to the same conclusion: Students do not know how to find or evaluate the information they need on the Internet.

In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: "I type a question." When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were "if it sounds good" or "if it has the information I need." Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations."

I find this seriously scary! As I have expressed in my earlier post Cast Away, the passing on of knowledge to the next generation is one of the most essential ingredients to continuing progress. How are people supposed to make informed decisions if they can't tell what the relevant information is to begin with? Where does that leave our political systems? But then I read the following:

"Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. [...]

Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace."

Wise words, eh? Guess where that's from? Guess, don't Google! It's a press release from the White House. No, really. It's an announcement for the "National Information Literacy Awareness Month" that was last year in October, which somehow passed me by. While recognizing a problem isn't the same as solving it, it is certainly a good first step. Let's hope that other nations will follow that example, there's clearly hope. Yes, we can do it! Indeed, there is more hopeful news today: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism some days ago published new data comparing the news coverage on blogs to that in the traditional press. Here's an interesting number: only 2% of news in the traditional press are about science and technology. But on the blogs, it's 18%.

On the Edge of Chaos

I saw this advert about a month ago, and it got me thinking. It doesn't matter much if you don't understand German, the visuals speak for themselves:


It's an advert for craftsmanship (Handwerk). The song lyrics are roughly saying: imagine how life would be without them. (The long list in the end is a list of professions.) To me it shows so nicely how incredibly complex our life has become, and how much that we take for granted is only a very recent achievement in the history of mankind.

Terra Incognita

As you know, I am presently at a workshop at Perimeter Institute about the Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability. Yesterday, we had a talk by Marcelo Gleiser titled “What can we know of the world?”. It occurred to me somewhat belatedly that I recently read an article by Gleiser in New Scientist, “The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything.” In that article, he writes that after “Fiften years [as] a physicist hard at work hunting for a theory of nature that would unify the very big and the very small” he has come to the conclusion that “the very notion of a final theory is faulty.” In a nutshell, that was also what his talk was about.

The only thing that's interesting about this insight is that it took him 15 years to arrive there. And maybe, why it got printed in New Scientist. Of course the notion of a final, fundamental, theory of all and everything is faulty. For the simple reason that even if we had a theory that explained everything we know, we could never be sure it would eternally remain the theory of everything we know. As Popper already realized about a century ago, one cannot verify a theory, it can only be falsified. Thus, theories we have are forever out for test, always on the risk that some new data does not fit in. That's exactly what makes a theory scientific. It's also one of the points I made in my FQXi essay. You see, I'm an even Newer Scientist.

That we can never know whether a theory is truly fundamental and able to explain all observable phenomena of course does not mean there is no fundamental theory. It just means we can never know - so your believe that such a theory exists belongs in the realm of religion, not science.

In any case, in his talk (video and audio here), Gleiser touched on another topic that reminded me of something else. He had a sketch of our expanding knowledge, with a filled circle representing “The Known” in the middle, that is expanding into what is now the unknown (“perennial ignorance”) outside:



I used a similar, though slightly different analogy for the progress of science in my PI public lecture some years ago (which incidentally has the same title as the FQXi essay, I'm very into recycling). In this case though, I used a map of Middle Earth.

The message that I wanted to convey is that the process of knowledge discovery is very similar to exploring unknown territory. There are parts that you have already seen and that you know very well, though details may be missing. And let me be clear that with “The Known” (in contrast to Gleiser) I don't mean laws themselves but the data from which the laws were extracted. Otherwise you lose information that is possibly important about the range of applicability (information you at first possibly didn't think was relevant).

You try to explain the known by a theory, and if everything fits you point somewhere into the unknown (make a prediction). Ideally, experimentalists go there and find what you told them they would find. You don't want to point out too far because people today are quite impatient, and if your prediction is not measurable within their lifetime it won't help you get tenure. The other way progress happens is that there is data available for which a theoretical explanation is missing. Or a theory might be sketchy and not work very well. That's the situation of the experimentalist saying: we've seen something on the horizon, please explain that. The body of knowledge that we have is usually not neatly simply connected, but typically has some pieces that don't really match with anything else.

Which brings me back to Gleiser's article then. The essential question is not whether you do or don't believe in a fundamental theory of everything. The essential question is what is a good and promising way to expand what is known. You can believe in flying spaghetti monsters, reincarnation, or a theory of everything: if it helps you with your research, by all means, go ahead, just don't put your believes in the abstract of your paper.

Experimental input is of course essential to progress all along. On the theoretical side, the obvious reason why people are looking for a unification of the known forces is that unification has worked previously and has been tremendously successful. The same holds for symmetry principles. Sure, that doesn't mean these procedures will continue to be successful, but it's the obvious thing to try. It's the same reason why a band's second hit sounds like the first, and why, after my move to Sweden I first had to learn that asking to speak to a supervisor and complaining about lacking customer service is not a very successful tactic in this country. Similarly, we might have to reconsider our tactics and learn new ways of thinking if we remain unsuccessful making headway on today's big questions in physics. For example when it comes to resolving the apparent tension between General Relativity and quantum mechanics, or to explain the arrow of time, rspt the initial conditions of the universe: It's terry incognita and there may be dragons.

That's why I find meetings like the current one at PI very useful to become more aware of our standard mode of thinking, for awareness and acknowledgement of limitations of a procedure is the first step to improvement.

Abramowitz/Stegun goes online

Did you ever need to learn about the properties of some obscure mathematical function which turns up when you try to solve, say, the Schrödinger equation with a linear potential?

In the times before Wikipedia and Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics/MathWorld, the usual way to proceed was to go to the library and look up in the "Abramowitz/Stegun", a compilation of formulas, relations, graphs and data tables for all kinds of functions you can think of.



Airy functions Ai(x), Bi(x) and M(x). dlmf.nist.gov/9.3#F1.


Over the last years, Milton Abramowitz' and Irene A. Stegun's time-honored "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" has been carried over to the internet age as the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Published by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST),

... the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF), is the culmination of a project that was conceived in 1996 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The project had two equally important goals: to develop an authoritative replacement for the highly successful Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, published in 1964 by the National Bureau of Standards (M. Abramowitz and I. A. Stegun, editors); and to disseminate essentially the same information from a public Web site operated by NIST. (From the DLMF Preface)

Parts of the DLMF have been available since some time, but the complete site went online just last week, on May 11.

In comparison to the old printed book, there are more functions and formulas, which all can be copied as Latex or MathML code. And while the function graphs at MathWorld are interactive, the DLMF features more detailed descriptions of applications in mathematics and physics, and links to freely available software libraries.

Should I ever need to code Jacobian Elliptic Functions, I'll know where to look them up.

---

Via bit-player, where you can also read more about the history of the Abramowitz/Stegun.

The Future of the Conference

As you know, I am here at Perimeter Institute for the upcoming workshop on the Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability. Every time I lift my bag on a scale at a check-in counter I am wondering if there will come a time when, instead of stepping on a plane, we will meet in cyberspace.

The Past

The classical conference in academia is still omnipresent. You go, you sit and listen to a dozen talks a day, you smalltalk over coffee and cheap cookies and try to get to know some people at the "social event," typically a reception with buffet or a conference dinner. Also typical is that the average participants pays a horrendously high fee that covers the VIP guests airfare and four star hotel. But that's okay because most of the participants have a travel grant for exactly this purpose.

That might sound a bit dull, and it frankly sometimes is, but there are a lot of good reasons both to organize and go to a conference.

On the participant's side: Most notably, conferences are useful to obtain or keep an overview on the research going on in one's field. An overview both on the what and on the who. It is possible to do that by other means, but a conference is an especially efficient way to do it, in particular if you're a newcomer. In contrast to reading a review, you can go and talk to the people who work on similar stuff like you and face-to-face communication is still the best way to exchange information. You might learn about some unfinished work and find a new collaborator. You might get to hear a talk by some of the more well-known people in the field that might be unlikely to pass by your own institution. And last but not least, you have the opportunity to communicate your own research, get feedback and advice.

On the organizer's side: Organizing a conference takes a lot of work and time. One doesn't make money with a scientific conference - in fact the first steps will be trying to find sponsors. Reasons for organizing a conference are most notably to advance the research in one's own field. It's to bring together and support the community, to spread ideas, to foster the formation of collaborations. Conferences are also frequently used to advertise the institution where they take place, which most often is one of the main sponsors. As an organizer one often has, to some extend, the possibility to select speakers that one is interested in hearing or meeting. And then there is the communication of the research field's relevance beyond the own community. Many conferences will have a public lecture and will have some media coverage, at least in the news magazine of the university where it takes place.

There are a few variations to the conference scheme. A workshop for example will typically have fewer participants and fewer talks, and these talks will be more specialized and leave more room for discussion. The large conferences will often separate talks into plenary talks and parallel session. Sometimes they will dump people into a poster session.

The Present

During the last years, with the spread of social networking tools and the continuing improvements in information technologies, one could start to see some modifications of the standard scheme. To begin with, it is nowadays possible to let a speaker deliver a talk by video link and it is similarly possible to let people participate by streaming video. I have been to a few conferences were talks were given by video and they typically are not very well attended. I'm not entirely sure why. It's like people think "Oh, he wont really be here." Or maybe it's that, not so surprisingly, these talks typically imply a lot of technical fiddling and are fault-prone. That however will improve the more often it happens.

Another quite obvious change that is now so common one easily takes it for granted, is that most conferences have the slides of talks online and in many cases even a recording. This is so omnipresent that indeed most conferences no longer publish proceedings. I find this extremely useful because I don't have to take notes and write down a reference on the speaker's slide. I can just go and look it up later.

Then there are the changes in format. I wrote previously that I was at the SciBar Camp in Toronto and later at the SciFoo Camp in California. In this case the schedule is not set before the start of the meeting, but assembled by self-organization and participant's interests upon arrival which is greatly aided if the participants had in advance a possibility to exchange their interests online. This spontaneous self-assembly has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it's a more flexible format that expresses the participants' rather than the organizers' interests, is more lively and interactive. Disadvantage is that most of the sessions will be pretty much unprepared. Since I actually prefer listening to thought-through arguments instead of improvised babble, I am not too much in favor of this mode of organization. I think that for scientific purposes, a combination of both, the old-fashioned scheduled talks and some more flexible sessions would be more suitable.

And then of course there is the use of social networking tools, like Twitter, Friendfeed and blogging or just setting up a networking site specifically dedicated to the event. Whether or not that works well depends crucially on how many people make use of it. But if it works well, this can serve a lot of purposes. One is clearly the communication to the public. But besides this it also improves the exchange between the participants. In particular if you are at a large conference you might not actually know who is interested in similar topics like you or who you might want to talk to in the coffee break. If a conference wants to make good use of Web2.0 tools first thing they should do is to aggregate the participants' feeds. It is somewhat ironic, but you might not actually know that the person sitting next to you is writing a blog you read frequently. And installations like a Tweetwall for example (a screen displaying tweets by participants, see picture) add a completely new layer to the discussions that can take place at a meeting and can greatly improve information exchange and facilitate networking.

It is interesting to see how more and more conference organizers are making use of these possibilities. It depends of course a lot on the technical support that they have. For example I read the other day on Resonaances that the International Conference on High Energy Physics 2010 has launched an official blog and recruited some bloggers to cover the event. How cool is that? One should add that of course these things have been done since years in some communities that are especially dedicated to advancing these changes in networking, blogging, outreach and information technology. And Perimeter Institute's outreach efforts have been playing around with all these possibilities since years, for example with the recent Quantum2Cosmos Festival. Point I'm trying to make is that the use of these tools is now slowly spreading and becoming more common.

The Future?

So what's next? NatureNetworks organizes conferences that are life-streamed to Second Life. Will this become the conference of the future? I think it is very well possible. I don't think it is very likely that conferences will become entirely decoupled from physical reality in the sense that we exclusively meet online. But it will become increasingly more common to attend a "real" conference "virtually" if one cannot be there in person for one or the other reason, may that be lack of funding or illness.

I also think that conferences will obtain several more virtual layers in the soon future. For example, I imagine that you go to a talk and while you are there can "log in" to the respective website, and so could people who are not physically there but following online. You could then for example skip back and forth in the slides as you wish or ask your colleague in the second row what he thinks about what the speaker just said. I think that this happens to some extend today by people sending emails, but it could become much better aggregated. I am not sure however that such a complex environment as SecondLife is necessary for these purposes. Though it has of course the advantage that the technology is already in place.

As to the increased flexibility in format. There is a quite obvious hurdle to having an academic conference that has not a program online a month ahead and neatly scheduled speakers: Many people can only justify their participation and receive a reimbursement for their expenses when they are giving a talk. This is a typical example where requiring "accountability" can be misguided (see also) and hinders improvements. However, I think that this problem will resolve by itself once funding agencies notice that there are other means to document one's participation in an event than being listed on the program. Basically, all they really want to know is that you didn't just spend the week on the beach at their expenses. But taking part in online discussions or blogging can serve a similar purpose.

Bottomline

Real change is happening and I think we'll see more of it!

Paradigm Shifts

One day, when I'm old and my hair is grey, and I'm sitting in a rocking chair stroking a cat on my lap when the neighbor's son comes with a book on the history of science, I want to say "Yes, I was there."

There are as many different motivations to become a physicist as there are physicists. But one of them is certainly the wish to be part of something greater, an event of historical importance. It's the wish to be there and have a say when our view of the world fundamentally changes; when a new picture comes into focus that will be passed on to future generations.

The change of our fundamental understanding of Nature, the emergence of a new way of thinking about the world is what is known as a "paradigm shift." It's a notion that occasionally creeps up in a discussion. It most often does so either as a means of defense, when a new proposal is widely rejected or when the speaker tries to make himself more interesting.

I was wondering the other day what paradigms there are that might be shifting today. In the 22nd century's textbooks, what of our today's understanding will appear in the historical appendix instead?

There's three such potential paradigm shifts that I've come across.

The first one is about the limits of reductionism. With the incredible success reductionism has had in physics in the first half of the century, there came the believe that one day we'll be able to explain everything by taking it apart into smaller and smaller pieces. This paradigm has by now pretty much shifted over in favor of acknowledging that emerging features might not be possible to explain, either in practice or in principle, by reduction to more elementary constituents (see also). This change on our perception came along with the rise of chaos theory and complexity, features that are both very common to natural systems and hard if not impossible to address by reductionist approaches. It is funny in fact how silently this shift seems to have taken place. You sometimes find today people in talk vigorously arguing that reductionism has limitations, just to find there's nobody actually disagreeing with them. Except for the old professor in the front row.

The second potential paradigm shift that has crossed my way is the multiverse. The multiverse I have in mind is the one forced upon you from the string theory landscape, a vast number of possible universes with different laws of Nature, versus the previously prevailing idea that our universe is unique and is so for a reason that we have to find. Various other sorts of multiverses seem to creep up from other considerations. The multiverse is presently a very hotly discussed topic, with strong defenders both for and against it. I have previously expressed my opinion that the multiverse isn't so much a new paradigm but a new way of thinking about an old paradigm. Instead of finding a way to derive the parameters of the standard model as a 'most optimal' configuration of some sort, one now searches for a measure in the multiverse by means of which our universe is (ideally) most likely. It's a watered-down version of the same game. In any case, I recall that Keith Dienes (the guy with the String Vacuum Project) spoke about the probabilistic attempt as a new way of thinking about "why" we have exactly these laws. And yes, I was thinking, maybe he's right and in some decades from now that will be how we think about our reality. That we're embedded in a vast number of different universes which different laws of Nature and our grandchildren will laugh about that we once thought we were unique.

The third potential paradigm shift is that spacetime might not be a fundamental entity. I think that everybody who works on quantum gravity (whatever sort of) is familiar with the idea. But I noticed on occasion, most recently when I was talking to Sophie about Verlinde's emergent gravity scenario, that the idea that space-time is only seemingly a smooth, continuous manifold with a metric on it and on small scales might be nothing like this is not very widely spread outside the community. While there are many approaches towards finding a more fundamental description of spacetime, they each suffer from their own problems. So I think it is pretty unclear presently whether this will turn out to be a true (and useful) description of Nature in some way. But it's certainly a thought hanging in the air. On the completely opposite side is the idea that space-time instead is the only fundamental entity and that matter indeed emerges from it (an idea that dates back at least to Kaluza and Klein). Or that neither is fundamental, but arises from something unified that's neither matter nor space-time.

These are all ideas that physicists have been chewing on for quite some while now. I am curious how people will be think about them in the future, if they will laugh about or foolishness or admire our imagination.

Under Construction

As you have probably seen from my Twitter-feed, I have made it to Waterloo, despite ash cloud and all. Perimeter Institute is, as usual, buzzing with activity. Since I have to contribute my part to the buzz, here's just a short update on the building construction. The photos from February are here. It is oddly pleasing to see reality evolve by plan, just as we've been shown in the models. It's so different from my every day life...

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge

In May 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the government's new Science and Technology agenda. The location they chose for this happened to be Perimeter Institute. I blogged about the event here. To introduce the Prime Minister, Mike Lazaridis, founder of the Institute said a few welcoming words (Video and audio here). An excerpt:

“We believe that bold focus and continuing investments in theoretical physics and its applications result in further breakthroughs. These in turn will be the basis for tomorrow's goods and services [...]

If we learned anything from this great experience that is Perimeter and IQC, it is this: Canada can lead the world in key scientific fields from which future economic prosperity and job creation will flow - as long as the private sector and governments make bold, focused, and long-term investments in carefully chosen fields.”

I didn't write about Lazaridis' words then because I distinctively recall feeling let down. So all the fundamental research we do, in the end it's all to produce something that you can go and buy at the mall? Needless to say, I do believe there is value in knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. Curiosity and the wish to know - where we come from, what we are made of, what is out there - is one of the key drivers of our development, both as a species and as a person. Material prosperity is a, certainly welcome and desired, result that better knowledge of the laws of Nature can bring. But knowledge itself also feeds our desires, even if it remains immaterial. Whenever somebody justifies fundamental research as an investment in future technologies (international competitiveness! economic prosperity! job creation!) they are missing half of the story. Yes, that's one of the reasons. But the other reason is that we just want to know.

Now I've never talked to Lazaridis and I actually don't know what his opinion is on the matter. It is very well possible that his speech to the Prime Minister was just a collection of “right things to say on such occasion.” (My only encounter with Big Mike was a very short one. I had been to PI's gym on a weekend and after half an hour or so on the treadmill had the sudden urge to look up something in a book. Sweaty and without glasses I headed over to the library, where a group of important looking grey suits were just being shown around. Thinking that I might leave a somewhat unfortunate impression, I silently vanished.) But leaving aside Lazaridis and the Canadians for a moment, the idea that tax-paid fundamental research in the end should produce some sort of *stuff* is unfortunately wide spread.

Last year Paul Drayson, Minister of Science in the UK, said

“Scientists should be accountable where work is funded by the taxpayer and therefore I think it is right that scientists should be asked to think about the impact that they have had.”

(as quoted in THE "Science, we have a problem."). What bothers me about this quotation is the implicit assumption that scientists do not think about the impact they have. As if scientists would not care whether their work is relevant for the society they are part of. I previously wrote that in my experience it is a crude misconception. Most people I know who work in fundamental research do actually suffer from feeling useless for the exact reason that the impact of their work is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. It is often even difficult to communicate. But think about it: there is the prospect that their work will fundamentally change the way we understand our own place in this world, possibly some centuries into the future. How do you want them to account for that?

To come back to the Canadians one more time, on page 20 of Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage, you can read:

“Science and technology is not an end unto itself. It is a means by which we can pursue sustainable development.”

(via Jeff Sharom). I am all for sustainable development. I am also totally in favor of innovation and I love my BlackBerry. I have a lot of fantasy and can imagine that our rapidly improved understanding of, for example, the first moments of the universe might one day lead in mysterious ways to an application. But sometimes science is an end unto itself.

Interna

If the charming Icelandic volcano lets me, I'll be flying to Toronto on the weekend. Next week, I'll be attending the PI workshop on the "Laws of Nature:Their Nature and Knowability," which promises to be interesting. I have some more trips upcoming this summer. Towards the end of June, there's a meeting of the "Working group on quantum black holes" in Bonn (which is part of the COST action "Black holes in a violent universe"), the SUSY 2010 happens to be also in Bonn in August. The Planck 2010 is May 31 to June 4 at CERN, where I will not be going because it conflicts with my Toronto trip. And of course there's the ESQG 2010, July 12-16, here in Stockholm. To top off the summer, my 15 year high school reunion is also planned for August. Not the busiest summer ever, but still seems I'll collect some frequent flyer miles.

You'll hear from me when I'm on the other side of the big water. Meanwhile, have a nice weekend or, as the Swedes say, ha det så bra.

Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

"Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're actin' like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life's like this you
You fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get, and you turn it into
Honestly, you promised me
I'm never gonna find you fake it
No no no"

~Avril Lavigne, Complicated

Complexity

It is interesting, if you follow the news press, how frequently one finds references to "complex" problems, issues and questions: "Illegal immigration is a complex [...] issue with no easy solution," "Toyota faces complex legal woes as lawsuits mount," "Senate passes complex, controversial energy reform bill," "[T]he subject of radicalization [...] is a complex problem," and so on and so forth. One is left to wonder, what is not complex?

The difference between complex and complicated is that a complex system has new, emergent features that you would not have seen coming from studying its constituents alone. (For the meaning of "emergent", see my earlier post on Emergence and Reductionism.) The complex problem, it can't be decomposed. It can't be reduced. It's global, interrelated, it's on many timescales, and it doesn't respect professional boundaries either. Worse, you don't know were it begins and ends. It's full of "unknown unknowns." It's not only their problem, it's our problem too.

If you need any evidence for the popular appeal to complexity, even the Pope had something to say about it last year:

"The current global economic crisis must also be viewed as a test: are we ready to look at it, in all its complexity, as a challenge for the future and not just as an emergency that needs short-lived responses?"

In a recent article in the New York Times, David Segal wrote

"[C]omplexity has a way of defeating good intentions. As we clean up the messes, there's no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work."

Calling a problem "complex" seems to mean nowadays to acknowledge one doesn't really know how to handle it. A complicated problem, sure, we'd figure out what to do. After all, evolution has kindly endowed us with big brains. But a complex problem? Our political and social systems can't deal with that. *Shrug shoulders* Now what? Let's clean up the messes and hope that a complicated solution will do.

It is true that the problems we are facing are becoming ever more complex. This is a consequence of our world getting increasingly more and increasingly better connected. This creates new opportunities and fosters progress, but along the way it causes interdependencies and, when left unattended, lowers resilience.

It is however not true that we don't know what to do with a complex problem. We just don't do it. In contrast to our political systems, humans are good at solving complex problems. It's the complicated ones that you better leave to a computer. Look at the quote from Avril Lavigne that is title for this post. She's talking about relationships. Navigating in a human society is a multi-layered task on many time-scales with unexpected emergent features. It's full of unknown unknowns. That's not a complicated problem - it's a complex one. We have the skills to deal with that.

The reason why we can't use our abilities to deal with economic or political problems is simply lack of input and lack of method. These are solvable problems. And they are neither complex nor complicated.

Optimization

I have written previously on what three requirements have to be fulfilled for a system to be able to develop into an optimal state, to find a good solution to a problem. One is free variation. Democracy and a free market economy are good conditions for that. The second one is to detect whether a small variation is an improvement or not. The third is the ability to react to the result of the variation. That's basically a poor man's way to find a maximum: go a step in each direction and take the direction that goes up*.

This procedure however dramatically fails whenever there is either data missing to find out whether a change is an improvement or not, or if there's no way to react to it. Take the recent economic crisis. There have been people all over the place who found something odd is going on; that this money creation out of nothing didn't make sense. They've had the data, but they've had no way to act on it. There was no feedback mechanism for their odd feeling. Way too late one would hear them saying they've sensed all the time something was wrong. From a transcript of a radio broadcast "This American Life" (audio, pdf transcript):

mortgage broker: ...it was unbelievable... my boss was in the business for 25 years. He hated those loans. He hated them and used to rant and say, “It makes me sick to my stomach the kind of loans that we do.”

Wall St. banker: ...No income no asset loans. That's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us. We're hoping you don't lie. Tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we won't verify? We’re setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back when and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened ... we did it because everyone else was doing it.

Italics added. (We previously discussed this in my post The Future of Rationality.)

It's not that nobody noticed what was going on. There was a variation taking place, but part of the change it was creating wasn't monitored. And there was no way to feed notice about the change back into the system. Computer programs made a risk assessment. They might not have made sense, but you wouldn't question them because everybody played the same game. In a recent NewScientist article, economist Ernst Fair is quoted saying

"Almost everyone in business, finance or government studies some economics along the way and this is what they think is the norm. It's a biased way of perceiving the world."

"Biased" is another way to say there's input missing.

We notice similar failures with other examples. Our economic systems are slow if not incapable of dealing with ecological problems because the problems don't automatically feed back into the system (at least not on useful timescales). There is a variation, but the optimization process can't work properly.

Backreaction

The reason why this close monitoring of the system (our global political, social, ecological systems) has become necessary and why no return to simplicity is possible is that even small groups of humans can cause a significant change to their environment. That may be a natural environment, social, or an organizational environment, which could be summarized as "background". In the earlier days, we were trying to achieve an optimization in a fixed background. Now, we can no longer neglect that we are changing the background by our own actions. In physics, this is commonly known as "backreaction."

If you take for example the deflection of light at the sun, then to compute the deviation you treat the photon as propagating in the fixed background field of the sun. That is an excellent approximation. Yet to be precise, the photon does actually change the background field too. If you'd take heavier objects passing by the sun, you'd eventually come to notice that they do contribute to the gravitational field too. The approximation of a fixed background is often made. For example, for the Hawking radiation of black holes, one commonly neglects the backreaction of the emitted radiation. This, again, is an excellent approximation, but one that breaks down at some point. (In this case when the energy of the emitted particles comes close to the mass of the black hole itself.)

If you are in a regime however where you can no longer neglect backreaction, as we are now with humans living on planet Earth, then you have to find a common solution for both the system and the background. Or you could say, they form a common system. This necessity to find a solution for both the background and the objects in it is one of the great insights of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, where the background is space-time, formerly thought to be an unchanging, fixed entity. You cannot have a time evolution for any system and just look at what the background will do or the other way round. You have to find a solution for both together. It is somewhat of a stretch to the notion of a "background" but I think that we are facing exactly this problem today when we are trying to find a sustainable solution for mankind living on this planet. We can either return to an era where backreaction was negligible and the background was eternally static and unchanging at our disposal. Or we learn how to find a stable solution to the full problem: us and our environment.

This issue is far more complex than you might think. That's because we are now in a situation were the change we cause to our environment does influence our own evolution and adaption to the environment. Human Culture has demonstrably been an evolutionary force since thousands of years already. And we are now only short of actively shaping our own evolution, not to mention that of other species. Whether that's a good idea or not depends on whether we are able to learn fast enough, ie whether assesment and reaction to a change is fast enough so the system doesn't just run down the hill before we can say bullshit.

Bottomline

And that's why I keep saying we need to finish the scientific revolution. Trial and error may have worked well to organize our living together for thousands of years, but this method has its limits. In an increasingly interconnected world, errors are too costly. We need to use a smarter method, a scientific method.

To be able to find a stable, sustainable, and good integration of the ongoing human development into the environment we need first of all to know what's going on. It is not too far fetched to think that Google will play a role in that with creating "real-time natural crisis tracking system," "real-world issue reporting system" or "collecting and organize the world's urban data" (see: Project 10 to the 100). The next step is to find a good way to extract meaning from all this data to be able to react in a timely manner to changes. People often seem to think that with that I mean the systems' dynamics has to be predicted. And let us be clear again that the system we are talking about is the global political, economical and ecological system. Having a model that makes good prediction would be nice, but it is questionable whether this is possible or even desirable. But that is in fact not necessary.

You don't need to predict the dynamics of the system. You just need to know what parameter space it will smoothly operate in so optimization works. You want to stay away from threshold effects, abrupt changes with potentially disastrous consequences. Think again about how we deal with human relationships. You don't predict what your friends, relatives or your partner will be doing. This would be pretty much impossible. But after you have got to know them you'll have an idea what to expect from them, and you'll be able to maintain a sustainable relationship on a balance of taking and giving. The same holds for the systems that govern our lives. You don't need to predict their evolution. You just need to know the limits. Life's like this...

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* This does not find you a global maximum, but that's a more complicated problem that we'll discuss some other time.

Physics Bits and Bites

Here are three interesting and intriguing physics items I came across recently:

• Last year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had organized a symposium called "Quest for the Perfect Liquid: Connecting Heavy Ions, String Theory, and Cold Atoms". Perfect, low-viscosity liquids can be observed when there is a very strong interaction between the constituents of the fluid, as is the case for the quarks and gluons created in heavy ion collisions at RHIC, or clouds of ultracold lithium atoms in optical traps. The strongly coupled quark gluon plasma can be described using the AdS/CFT correspondence, which brings sting theory into play (see also this earlier post). At the AAAS symposium, physicist-blogger Clifford Johnson (from Asymptotia) and Peter Steinberg (from Entropy Bound) discussed this connection, and a write-up of their presentation has now come out as a feature article in the May 2010 issue of Physics Today, "What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles" (free access).


• You may be aware of the ongoing quest for the densest possible packing of tetrahedra? The NYT wrote about this in January, and the articles mentions that a paper on the subject "prompted Paul M. Chaikin, a professor of physics at New York University, to buy tetrahedral dice by the hundreds and have a high school student stuff them into fish bowls and other containers." This project now resulted in a Physical Review Letter, with an experimentally determined volume fraction of 0.76±0.02 (The current theoretical "record" is at 0.856). Analysis of the experiment was done using Magnetic Resonance Imaging to look "into" the container crammed with tetrahedra, which shows that the packing is highly disordered. More background can be found in an article at "Physics", which also contains a free link to the PRL paper.


• Also via Physics, I've learned about what is the fastest (and possibly smallest) analogue computer to perform Fourier transforms: a single iodine molecule. A iodine molecule consists of two iodine atoms, which can vibrate, realizing a tiny harmonic oscillator. During one period, a harmonic oscillator follows a circular trajectory in phase space, which means that the Wigner function describing the quantum state of the oscillator "switches" space and momentum coordinates every quarter period. Going from real space to momentum space corresponds to a Fourier transform, so when the wave function of the iodine molecule is prepared in real space, after quarter of a period, the wave function encodes the Fourier transform of the initial configuration. Using laser, it is possible to prepare the molecule in definite state, and to probe the state again later. This allows discrete Fourier transforms for four and eight elements, and all this within 145 femtoseconds, "which is shorter than the typical clock period of the current fastest Si-based computers by 3 orders of magnitudes." (Ultrafast Fourier Transform with a Femtosecond-Laser-Driven Molecule", PRL).

Publication Cut-off

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has taken an important and overdue step. To limit their applicant's attempts to blind the reviewer with publications, from July 1st 2010 on a maximum of 5 publications can be listed in the CV. In addition to this, only papers that are already published can be listed. Previously, it was possible to also list papers that are submitted, but not yet published. The change in this policy is apparently a reaction to an instance last year in which applicants (in the area of biodiversity) invented publications. (More details on the new regulation here.) It remains unclear to me whether a paper on the arxiv counts as published or unpublished.

With this decision, the DFG is clearly signaling that it's quality that matters, and not quantity. Or at least that's what should matter for their referees. Another reason for the change is that other countries have similar restrictions. The NSF for example also has a limit of 5 publications relevant for the project, and the NIH 15.

Matthias Kleiner, President of the DFG said

“With this we want to show: For us it is the content that matters for the judgement and the support of science.”

And he bemoans that today

“The first question is often not anymore what somebody's research is but where and how much he has published.”

(As quoted in Physik Journal, April 2010, my translation).

The DFG is the funding source for scientific research in Germany. Not the only one, but without doubt the most important one. This decision will therefore have a large impact. The impact however is limited in that the other major reason publication numbers are ever increasing is that hiring committees pay attention to these numbers - or at least are believed to pay attention, which is sufficient already to create the effect. The President of the German Higher Education Association (DHV*), Bernhard Kempen, comments

“To assess a candidate's qualification in a hiring process it should also be solely the content of provided publications, not their number, that is decisive for an appointment.”

(as quoted here, my translation.)

Since I have written many times that it hinders scientific progress when selection criteria set incentives for researchers to strive for secondary goals (many publications) instead of primary goals (good research), it should be clear that I welcome this decision by the DFG.

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* DHV stands for Deutscher Hochschulverband. The literal translation of the German word "Hochschule" is "high school" but the meaning is different. "Hochschule" in Germany is basically all sorts of higher education, past finishing what's "high school" in America. The American "high school" is in German instead called "Oberstufe," lit. "upper step." See also Wikipedia.

It's the stupidity, stupid

Something else that I read on our long road trip from Frankfurt to Stockholm is this nice essay by Martin Schwarz on

The importance of stupidity in scientific research.

Martin Schwarz is Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia.

“Science makes me feel stupid,” he writes. But instead of avoiding it, he “actively seek[s] out new opportunities to feel stupid.” In a nutshell, his essay says that if you're doing research and you don't feel stupid every now and then, you're doing something wrong. You have to keep asking till you ask what nobody has asked before and then you're on you're own. Feeling stupid. If you stick to questions whose answers are known, you might feel smart, but you won't contribute to knowledge discovery.

I basically agree with Schwarz and I welcome that he is getting his point across so well. It is perfectly okay if science makes you feel stupid, whether you're a professional scientist or not. Just don't stop there. I however find it somewhat misleading that Schwarz calls it stupidity if one doesn't know an answer since it mixes up knowledge with intelligence. But it makes for a more catchy title.

Unfortunately, it is badly communicated in school what actual research is like. School science is still mostly a presentation of knowledge that's at least a century old. The answers are all known and your task is to pipe them into your head. But that's a bad preparation for research, and it doesn't get across the wonder and fascination of going where nobody has gone before and thinking what nobody has thought before. I vividly recall that in my first semesters at the university the most exciting moments were when a professor or a tutor (usually a postdoc) mentioned an unsolved problem, an open questions. There it was, the frontier of knowledge, and I wanted to go and poke around in the dark.

Martin Schwarz recalls his experience with his first own research project:

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

Of course one never really knows whether there isn't somebody who knows an answer to your question. And if you've spent weeks only to figure out that indeed for other people on the planet the answer had been well-known, you feel really stupid. But then it also happens occasionally that the answer that everybody thought was well-known actually was wrong... As my teacher used to say: the only stupid question is the question not asked.

Partly related, Eric-Wubbo Lameijer over at Nature Network has an excellent series of posts on the IQ, what it measures and what not, Should you be smart to become a scientist? I, II and III. See also my earlier post How important is talent?.

Oh-oo-oh, you think you're special

I once joked that when my blood pressure is too low I go and buy the Time Magazine. It works better than medication and with less side-effects. Now that I live in Sweden however, the Time Magazine doesn't stare at me on the register in every supermarket. Since Stefan cares about my well-being, he now has a subscription, special offer, EUR 20 for one year. And thus, on our road trip from Frankfurt back to Stockholm I browsed through one of the recent issues. So I can now offer you a particularly nice example for American arrogance self-confidence.

In the March 11 issue, Andres Martinez suggests one of "the most important trends of the new decade" in his article

The Next American Century

The "important trend" is, in a nutshell, that the world will become a Global America:

"The fact that the rest of the world is becoming more like us — in ways good and bad — underscores the extent to which we are living in an American century, even as it erodes, by definition, the notion of American exceptionalism."

He derives this development towards The Global America from a thought experiment:

"If you bring together teenagers from Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Argentina — to pick a random foursome — what binds these kids together in some kind of community is ..."

Let's see, what could it be that binds these teenagers together? They like Pizza? They have skin problems? They think their parents are embarrassing? No, it's actually...

"... American culture: the music, the Hollywood fare, the electronic games, Google, American consumer brands."

Well, to be honest I don't know very much about the Nigerian music scene, but I'm not sure what this is supposed to say except that some countries can't really afford to invest millions in "producing" stars. So let's for a better comparison have a look at this week's German top 10 single charts. The singer's nationalities are in order from 1 to 10: German, German, Belgian, German, American, British, French, American, Virgin Island (I guess that's still British?), American. 3 out of 10 is not bad, but maybe Martinez should take a trip to Germany or France and turn on a radio to get a realistic perspective on the international music scene.

Sure, I am willing to admit that he is right to a large extend, American music and movies are wide spread. And yes, we all use Google and it's an American company. But that's the past. How is that predictive for what the next century will look like?

Well, Martinez isn't done with his insightful analysis. He further lets the reader know:

"As anyone raised in a different country will tell you, two of the strongest impressions someone has on arriving in the U.S. are 1) what a great country this seems to be, and 2) what a mess it must be, judging by the tenor of news coverage and political discourse."

rotfl, the strongest impression that I had after moving to the USA was 1) what a mess this country is and 2) how ridiculous it is that the news coverage desperately tries to protect the American "exceptionalism." Martinez' article is an excellent example of 2).

As you can guess I know a lot of people who are European (mostly German) who spent a postdoc in the USA. They generally share my impression. Let's face it: American food either sucks or is overpriced. American highways are countrywide in a pity state. Americans seem to have no clue how to do a decent plumbing work or how to achieve a functioning canalization. They will instead always tell you there's something specifically weird with their weather. For example, it might rain. Or the sun might shine. Windows in America either don't open or, if you managed to open them, they won't close. Since the windows and doors don't really close, naturally there always has to be a heating or air conditioning running. And let's not even start with issues like education, poverty or health insurance. I think you get the point. The only thing that's really exceptional about Americans is how they still manage to believe they are exceptional.

But you know what? This lifestyle based on low quality standards and constant maintenance has one big advantage: it increases the GDP that Martinez is so proud about. Yes, that's right, every time you wreck a wheel in a pothole, every time your child gets sick, every time you call the plumber, every time you call customer service, every time something breaks and has to be fixed, every time something can't be fixed and has to be replaced, the GDP goes up.

Luckily, unlike what Martinez writes, Europe is not turning into a second America. We actually have working public transportation over here. According to the World Economic Forum the most tech-friendly country is Sweden. Past 2001 the "Top Intelligent Community" has not been in the USA (and in 2001 it was NYC, hardly representative for the nation). If you go to the dentist next time, look at the label of the instruments because chances are the equipment is made in Germany. In the biggest part of Europe same-sex-partnerships are legal. In Germany, prostitution is legal, so is abortion. How long will it take for Americans to crawl out of the 20th century? And Shania Twain, who wrote the line that is the title to this blogpost, well, she's Canadian.

Okay. Now that I'm done with Martinez' ridiculous essay let me get this straight. I'm not a nationalist. There are indeed many things about America that I like very much. Ahead of all, there's the entrepreneurial spirit which is taken on in the, infinitely better, article "In Defense of Failure" by Megan McArdle in the same issue of Time Magazine. If you have a start-up idea, if you want to try something new, if you want to be crazy: America is the place to go, not Europe. There are many things Europe could learn from America, ahead of all maybe how to establish a proper "union," and there are things America could learn from Europe, ahead of all maybe how to build proper highways. The same probably holds for other parts of the world. We can all learn from each other, and this exchange is not a one-way process.

I don't think we'll globally converge on the same values and tastes any time soon, and I don't think this would be desirable either. There are some issues we have to converge on in an increasingly interconnected planet, and we have to work on that. But it is extremely unlikely that the outcome will be The Global America.

"You're Tarzan!
Captain Kirk maybe.
John Wayne.
Whatever!
That don't impress me much!"

~Shania Twain, That don't impress me much

A culture for debate?

Spiegel ONLINE has a very interesting and well written article that tells a story about controversy and the limits of collective intelligence at Wikipedia:

Backstage with the Wikipedians
Inner Workings of Global Encyclopedia 'Better than a Soap Opera'

The article contains some interesting facts, some of which you might have heard before. It is specifically about the German Wikipedia site, but I doubt this makes qualitatively much of a difference. While the site is frequently consulted, it's only a small fraction of people, of the order of some promille, that edit articles. Most of the registered users seem to never use their account. The people who contribute frequently seem to be driven to a large extend by the social ranking in that community. This is not very different to other online forums. The number of rules and regulations for editing Wikipedia articles has been steadily increasing. Spiegel online interviewed Henriette Fiebig who works at the German headquarters of Wikipedia. She says

"Now you need three days just to read all the rules."

Even more interesting is what Elisabeth Bauer, who has played a leading role in the German Wikipedia community from the beginning on, says about these rules:

"Discussions in those days didn't last long, because there was hardly anyone there to participate. We often just established rules quickly, without giving them a lot of thought. It seems strange to see how some people today are beating themselves up over things that you yourself simply wrote down at some point."

A development that I've seen happen in completely other circumstances as well...

The Spiegel ONLINE article further focuses as example on one particular debate that went on "backstage" in the discussion pages. It features a completely irrelevant detail, a guy who can't admit to be neither wrong nor compromise on that irrelevant detail, and a women who gets angered by that guy and tries to drown him in facts. The detail in this case is the question whether or not the Danube tower is a TV tower. For what I am concerned, as long as you haven't defined what a TV tower is, you can't answer the question, so first thing you should do is to clarify what the issue is about. And arguments about definitions are moot anyway. A definition is never wrong, it's just more or less useful.

But, as you can guess, a guy with a big ego who can't compromise can waste other people's time and in the end often wins just because everybody in their right minds realizes they are wasting their time.

It is a sad story and one that, unfortunately, is very typical for online conversations. It makes me wonder, once again, if not a wide-spread education in how to lead fruitful and constructive arguments would be helpful to alleviate this issue.

If you found that status report from the inner workings of online-communities depressing, I recommend you read this heart-warming NYT story:

How a Mother Lost in the Travel Chaos Was Found

Occupational Risk

Yesterday, I went to see my bank consultant to get advice on my pension perspective, or rather absence thereof. Side-effect of constant moving and short-term contracts, I am presently eligible for a pension of 3 cents per month from the State of Arizona, which is a nice gesture but doesn't even pay the parmesan on the spaghetti. While the banker was at it, he also tried to talk me into a life-insurance.

After entering age, gender and marital status to calculate the rate, he asked what I do for a living. I'm a physicist, I told him. It then appeared a submenu with a refined job description, astrophysicist, atomic and molecular physics, etc. Lacking high energy physics, I opted for nuclear physics. Hey, is what it says on my door sign: "Assistant Professor, Sabine Hossenfelder, High Energy and Nuclear Physics." So the bankman enters nuclear physicist, and on the screen appears a warning that the occupational risk has to be assessed by a specialist. Well, I say, the only health risk that my occupation brings is that I accidentally poke out my eye with a pencil. And the highest occupational risk of a high energy physicist is probably ending up as a banker. Who wrote that software?

I finally opted against the life-insurance, but I'm now signed up for a pension plan. If I pay in for the next three decades I might then actually be able to afford the parmesan. Unless there's some major disaster, like Central Europe being 1 m below sea level by 2041 or so, I actually have a parmesan guarantee. I feel very grown-up now. At some point I'll have to figure out what to do about the spaghetti. And maybe I should make sure there's no fuel rods in my desk drawer, one never knows.

It comes soon enough

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.

~Albert Einstein

I think of the future frequently - and more often than not I think it could come sooner. But sometimes I am stunned when I read things I've been talking about actually become reality.

For example, I was thinking around the time the Internet took off it would be great if customers could use this globally connected information pool to obtain additional product details upon demand. Such applications are now, though not yet wide-spread, perfectly doable by scanning a barcode with a phone and downloading the information via wireless internet connection.

RedLaser from Jeffrey Powers on Vimeo.

Granted, the information I was thinking of was more about the production details than customer reviews since lack of information skews consumers interest. You see, I wanted to improve the world. Basically I was thinking that to decide whether a product is worth the investment, the customer would need to know what fraction of the price went into the production, advertisement, marketing, and what is profit. For example, if a product has a higher price but claims to be more environmentally friendly, I would actually like to know how much of the price is due to that friendliness. I would also like to know if a product is less expensive than others because the company pays their workers less or whether they invest less in clogging my mailbox with spam.

Another development that has been on the way for a while is identification or possibly payment by fingerprint. While I totally appreciate not having to recall pins or carrying a stack of cards, using fingerprints as identification method strikes me as one of the dumber ideas I've come across. After all, you leave your fingerprints constantly and everywhere. That identification method is not yet used sufficiently often, but I have no doubt once it spreads somebody would come up with a clever method to fake an index finger. Then all he has to do is go into a public restroom and grab a few. The fingerprint payment idea made headline a few years ago, but it doesn't seem to have taken off which I'm not too surprised about.

Something else seems to me will happen in the next decade or so is that the boundary between virtual and real reality will become increasingly fuzzy and instead we'll have what could be called a multi-layered reality. Imagine you go into a cafe and your handheld device will tell you not only where you are but also the history of the place and people who've been there before and what they thought about the place. It will also tell you who are the people in the room, if they have signed up for such a service. They might have a profile online containing information they want to share. Maybe they're single and looking for somebody. Maybe they're about to go on a vacation to Cuba and are interested talking to somebody who has been there before. Maybe they're a physicist and would rather be left alone. There might be the shop owner who has his CV online and the waitress is writing a blog that you can read while you're waiting for a muffin. I can easily imagine if sufficiently many people would be using this, it also provides a basis for a new type of semi-virtual reality games.

Something entirely different that I've been thinking about was that before it becomes possible to grow human organs in the lab for transplantation purposes, something that is slowly coming closer to reality, it would be possible to grow meat suitable for consumption without having to bother with the whole animal. Last year I read that scientists are talking about genetically engineering animals to not feel pain. I don't think that's likely to spread, it's far to messy. More likely, a century from now, we'll have factories with organ bags that resemble nothing like animals at all.

And then there's all those folks who want to become immortal by uploading themselves to a computer. Well, I spent the last evening trying to reanimate my mother's crashed-down PC. The brain-upload story always gives me a good laugh. You show me a computer that is as complex as and runs as stable as the human body for 80+ years. I think people who want to upload themselves to a computer severely underestimate how amazing it is that our bodies function so well and what an incredible achievement of Nature this orchestrated complexity is. I don't think it's entirely impossible that one day we'll replace the human body with some artificial device, but it's much more in the future than people want to believe. I think it is more likely that in the end we'll have some bio-tech cross-solution.

In any case, something that seems to me much closer in the future is to overcome the isolation of the human brain. To me, the largest tragedy of life is that we're all alone and fundamentally so. However, in difference to uploading your brain to a computer, connecting it to another one doesn't seem to me that far fetched at all. Neuroscientists have made steady progress on measuring and deciphering brain activity. It is also known that the human brain is incredibly good at learning how to work with new input, and we have the ability of cognitively making extensions of our body our own, an ability known as "extended mind." The obvious step to take seems to me not trying to get a computer to decipher somebody's brain activity, but to take the output and connect it as input to somebody else. If that technique becomes doable and is successful, it will dramatically change our lives.

I just hope it comes soon enough so I have a chance to see how it works.

Hello from Germany

As previously mentioned, I am presently on a 1,500 km road-trip from Stockholm to Frankfurt. Skies are clear and blue, but the weather forecast says the wind in Central Europe will continue to blow South-East, directly from Iceland, for some more days. Stefan managed to get a train ticket to Copenhagen, where we met. Currently we are in Hamburg. Below is a photo from the ferry from Denmark to Germany. (If you look closely you can see the guy who took the photo in the reflection in the door.)


All along the way there are stranded travelers. Rental cars are impossible to get. Train tickets are in high demand. A few companies acted fast and are offering bus services between major cities. So far, people are taking it well-humored and calmly. After all, a volcano eruption is as close to higher power as one wants to get while alive. In Copenhagen, we were staying in an airport hotel which was peacefully quiet. In the lobby they had an information screen that usually lists departure times. It showed "cancelled" all the list down.

Meanwhile, after several days being grounded, the airlines are starting to grumble whether the flight ban is necessary since the scientific basis is basically lacking. There have hardly been any measurements taken, due to lacking equipment. Some planes seem to have been moved empty between airports, and no problems occurred. Especially short-distance flights do also often not reach traveling altitude. I read this morning that some airports in Europe have been reopened today.

And while I was at downloading the photo from my digicam, here's another photo. That's how living in the EU is like:


The above is an ironing instruction from my curtain (IKEA of course). The literal translation of the German instruction is actually not "iron on reverse" but "iron from left." I have no clue why, but if one carries a T-shirt inside-out, in German you'd say it's carried left. Maybe there's a political interpretation for that ;-) But if it makes little sense for a shirt, it makes even less sense for a curtain. Note: In Germany, the side facing the window is left.

While the language barriers in the EU are slowly fading with the younger generation all speaking English as second language, one would wish Europe could at least agree on one currency. But our pockets are presently filled with EUR, SEK and DKK. They can't even agree on whether it's Kronor or Kroner!

Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice

Last summer it went through the news: magnetic monopoles had been observed! First time I read this headline I was pissed off that nobody had told me. Upon reading the article it turned out however that the discovery was not one of elementary magnetic monopoles, but instead magnetic monopoles in condensed matter systems. It's okay nobody told me that because I'm not exactly known for my close ties to the condensed matter community. I thought at the time it might be worth mentioning on this blog, but changed my mind at the prospect of explaining what a corner-touching tetrahedral lattice is. Now last month I heard a seminar by Steven Bramwell, one of the experimentalists who made it into the headlines and one of the authors of the Nature article reporting on the discovery. He offered a simplified two-dimensional picture that I found very illuminating and totally blog-suitable.

Coulomb's Needle

Before we start, let me point out that while elementary magnetic monopoles, when discovered, would mean a change to the fundamental laws of electrodynamics, the magnetic monopoles in condensed matter systems are perfectly compatible with usual electrodynamics. We all learn in school that there are no magnetic monopoles. But there are configurations that appear like magnetic monopoles. In fact, I learned in Bramwell's talk that Coulomb did not only come up with a potential for electric point charges, but also with one for magnetic point charges. The latter didn't survive it into modern textbooks though. What Coulomb did was to measure the magnetic field around the end of a very thin needle. You can nicely measure this field, except of course exactly inside the needle. We know today that the magnetic field lines going through the needle into its tip do exactly balance the outgoing ones that Coulomb measured. There are thus no sources for the magnetic field. Whether or not the needle is straight doesn't matter, it just has to be something that's essentially one-dimensional. That the field around the end-tip looks like the one for electric charges is simply a consequence of the geometry*.

In any case, you all know what happens if you take a magnet and break it apart. Instead of getting two opposite magnetic charges, you just get two smaller magnets, so that's not useful. The way you “make” a magnetic monopole is to instead create something akin the needle that Coulomb was measuring the field of, deforming the needle, and then hiding it in a haystack. In the end, the only thing you can sensibly talk about are the endpoints of the needles which stick out if you measure the magnetic field.

Spin Ice

The system that the experimentalists used for their measurements is called a “spin ice.” The spin ice, named for its resemblance to water ice, features the above mentioned corner-touching tetrahedral lattice with little magnets on the corners of the tetrahedron that arise from the magnetic moments of the atoms at these locations. This molecular arrangement is akin to the H₂O ice. In ice, the larger oxygen atom sits in the middle of a tetrahedron, surrounded by 4 hydrogen atoms, two of which are nearby (the one "belonging" to the central oxygen atom), and two which are further away (belonging to neighboring oxygen atoms) and making up so-called "hydrogen bonds". If you draw an arrow towards the oxygen in the center when the hydrogen is close, and an arrow away when it's far, you have a corner-touching tetrahedral lattice with four arrows to or from the center of the tetrahedra (see picture).

Now think of a structure where instead of hydrogen atoms there are titanium atoms and rare-earth atoms such as holmium located at the corners of the tetrahedra. These metal atoms have magnetic moments which in this lattice configuration only can point either inwards or outwards of the tetrahedra, just as the arrows indicating the positions of hydrogen atoms in ice. That's the spin ice.

Magnetic Monopoles on a Sheet of Paper

Confused? We can vastly simplify that spin ice by looking at a 2-dimensional analogy. You can do it on a sheet of paper, as shown in the picture below. Use a pencil and have an eraser ready. The little arrows are the magnets. The lattice rule is that to each square, two arrows go in, and two go out, as with the spin ice. This is the preferred configuration.


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Now let us create a defect in that lattice by switching one of the arrows. With this you now notice that, above the background of the lattice, there's a magnet sitting there. The one pole has three arrows in (red), the other one three arrows out (green). If you'd measure the magnetic field, you would find find these two poles.


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Next step is to pull the ends of the magnet apart without creating further defects. The below picture shows a first step. If you draw it on a sheet of paper, you will easily see that you can pull the defects further apart, not necessarily in one straight line. The defects will be connected by a one-way oriented path of arrows along the path that you've pulled them apart. That's creating and deforming Coulomb's needle if you wish.

[Click to enlarge]

Final step is to add a few more such paired defects and and pulling them apart. Then sit back, look at your lattice and try to find Coulomb's needle, ie the connection between the oppositely charged defects. You'll notice the following. There is no unique connection between any two defects. They can be connected by many different lines, and they can no longer be considered paired either. The below picture shows an example with two defects and some of the possible connection lines. If you look closely, you will find more connections than I've drawn.


[Click to enlarge]

Thus, you have “hidden” the needle in the background lattice. The defects are no longer paired, but can move around independently as if they were, you get it, magnetic monopoles! You can then go and measure some of their properties, and these measurements confirming their existence is what made the headlines last summer.

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* No, wait, it's actually an entropic force!