Mojo's Mailbox #5

Events in the real world have complicated my schedule, which was already battling the headwinds of my considerable inertia and less than laserlike focus, but I do want to try to maintain something here on a fairly stable basis, so it behooves me to thank the various contributors who give me reason to. Since the last mailbox, I have been inexcusably indolent, but still several of you found reason to drop me comments and thereby earn honorable mentions here. I'm going to try to resurrect this as a weekly feature, which of course requires having something to intersperse mailboxes with. Fortunately, I left myself a laundry list of items in progress last time out, so I at least have the material - it's just a matter of spinning it out...

I begin with the Mindbender, at which Heather gamely attempted an answer, which I can now confirm was incorrect. A future post will discuss the correct solution and pose a new Mindbender for the cryptically inclined to cogitate upon. Heather has been an encouraging presence on this baby-stepping blog, and I'll be speaking more of her later.

Karen was nice enough to thank me for my fortune-cookie-lite offering on her blog, which I find very perceptive and thought-provoking, so really if anybody should be thanking anybody it ought to be the other way around. I encourage anybody reading this to imbibe some wisdom from her if your other commitments so permit.

The "Project" Project - which, like many a Project to be discussed therein, is on official hiatus right now, although persistent rumors suggest it may yet emerge like a B-movie serial killer in the last reel - kicked off with a review of one of James Randi's sting operations, and brought a truly wonderful aphoristic response from Laurie about the scope of "the natural" - Laurie's blog deals with holistic themes that blur the boundary between the scientific and the mystical, and is another I'd highly recommend. Heather, for whose comments I can't express sufficient gratitude - Pirandello wrote about characters in search of an author, and I think many bloggers are characters in search of an audience - spoke eloquently to another aspect of magic: the wonder of it. I agree with her that we can get preoccupied looking for the man behind the curtain, and take the fun out of having our senses beguiled and deceived for a time. I have a few ideas for future blogs that arise out of this comment, and I appreciate the stimulus.

Although I don't get out and about around the blogosphere nearly enough, and I'm going to have to figure out a way to discipline myself into doing that because there are so many talented and interesting writers out there, I still doubt I'll find a title that delights me more than Fabulosity Nouveau. Wendy's blog weaves personal and global narratives and always has something, well, fabulous and nouveau to peruse. We are now clearly engaged in a war of compliments, since she said very nice things about my blog back when I was still writing it - although actually the nicest for me was that she intended to go look something up because I'd mentioned it. The idea that I can serve as a doorway onto something new for a reader is very satisfying for me, and it's certainly true that everybody who's commented on these pages has done as much for me in turn.

Lee, whose multifaceted creativity is partly responsible for what you see here, anticipated one of my blogs-in-progress in referencing 1984; Orwell's examination of the relationship between thought, language, and political action is very pertinent in today's media-saturated environment. I've got a couple more Agencywatch pieces lined up for days when I'm feeling political, and hopefully I'll be able to address the point Lee made in his comment without getting fitted for a tinfoil hat.

And so to the Round-up, which, I was pleased to observe, earned itself a thumbs up from Bryce that I'm happy to return: as a fellow alter-ego, I'm always gratified to see a creative talent married to a personable voice, just like what I'd like to be when I'm growed up. Bryce is the latest in an already uncountably vast sea of gifts from the generous and artistic Heather, with whom this mailbox fittingly ends as it started. She tagged me with questions, which I shall herewith attempt to answer.

1. What's the first thing you do in the morning? This is appallingly soppy, but the first thing I do in the morning, which is also the last thing I do at night, is tell my wife I love her. Sometimes I use those words, sometimes I use others, but that's always what I'm saying (and what she says back, unaccountably). A Cambridge professor found - for such men are always finding such things, presumably in lieu of such other things as fashionable haircuts or matching socks - that we can read words, even if the letters are scrambled, as long as the beginnings and endings are where they should be. I find I can live through days on the same basis.

2. How old do you feel? Ageless, I guess. One of the factoids I like to drop in the path of conversations - much as vandals drop breezeblocks in the path of oncoming trains - is that I was born a blue baby; strangulated by the umbilical cord, and revived only after some time in the infamous blue light by a dedicated team of doctors to whom I am on most days profoundly grateful. This is too convenient a scapegoat to pin all of my oddities on, but prolonged reflection upon the circumstance has left me with an outlook that has elements of the fatalistic acceptance of the very old and the perennial wonderment of the very young. I am remarkably blessed by this, and one of the several side-effects of it as a condition, if it's reasonable to refer to it as such, is that I generally feel myself to be the approximate age of whoever I'm dealing with, although they invariably feel I'm either younger or older than is actually the case. Very occasionally, I'll meet someone who doesn't know Germany was once divided, or that the Challenger was a shuttle that exploded in the sky over Florida, or that music was once recorded on cassettes (I no longer even expect anybody to remember vinyl), and be reminded of my provenance in the linear-time stream; but for the most part I live either in the moment or outside it, and in neither wise am I much troubled by concerns over my age, or lack of it.

3. What's your sign and does the description match your personality? I'm a great believer in the parasimplicity principle - not least for the egotistical reason that I formulated it myself. The parasimplicity principle is itself parasimplistic, by which I mean that it can be expressed in myriad ways all of which mean the same thing in different paradigms: one of the simplest is one adopted, long before my strangulation and subsequent birth, by Oscar Wilde - "nothing is itself alone." There is a neat symmetry in the fact that one of the more difficult expressions of parasimplicity is the reciprocal of Wilde's dictum: that "everything is other than itself." This seemingly irrelevant prolegomena leads to an observation about the descriptions appended to the various zodiacal signs, which are in my experience sufficiently lengthy and wide-ranging that it would be remarkable if I didn't identify with them. That said, I am both a textbook Pisces and a textbook Dragon, to a remarkable degree in both cases. Whether this is an application of the parasimplicity principle, or merely another example of it, I'm not sure; and, happily, neither frame alters the convenience of fit.

4) How do you like your caffeine? I very rarely drink coffee - by 'very rarely,' to qualify, I've drunk perhaps half a dozen cups this millennium - although I drink tea, both in the quaint English hot-with-milk-and-two-sugars and the adopted Southern iced-and-sweet varieties, much more frequently. Almost all of my caffeine, however, comes from Pepsi products. I drink far too many soft drinks, but everybody has to have a vice.

5) Favorite cartoon character? This question made me laugh, because another of those train-wreck factoids of mine concerns my youthful fondness for certain anthropomorphic female cartoon characters (Jessica Rabbit wasn't my style; oddly, Brittany Chipmunk was). But, in a more - shall we say - cerebral sense, my favorite is probably the Pink Panther.

I now need to find some victims to tag in turn with these same questions... and that concludes today's mailbox. Please don't attempt to unbuckle your seats until the ride comes to a complete halt. Thank you.

Z is for ... Zeno of Elea

Herewith a culling from my personal archive - an illustrative fable, borrowing heavily but unwittingly from Lewis Carroll's What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, which I didn't actually encounter until later in a linear-time paradigm. The tortoise in my story advances three of the "immeasurably subtle and profound" (thank you, Bertrand Russell) paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher hailed by Aristotle as the inventor of the dialectic. It is perhaps appropriate that this fable takes a dialectical form.

* * *

"Let us race," declaimed the tortoise with a loftiness belying his low center of gravity.

The hare left off appreciating the feel of the wind cool against his long ears and regarded the tortoise with leporine indulgence.

"You want... us... to race?" clarified the hare, not unkindly he thought.

The tortoise nodded, an exercise that took long enough that the hare had time to watch a small cloud scud across the sky overhead. It looked like a nice head of lettuce, he thought. His stomach rumbled: his was an active metabolism.

"Each other?" The hare was a thorough if not a very bright animal.

Again the tortoise nodded, and the hare occupied himself scratching at his flank.

"But I'm much faster than you," explained the hare as sensitively as he could. "You racing me would be just pointless."

"Oh, it doesn't matter how fast we go, you know," remarked the tortoise pleasantly. "It's a question of how far."

This seemed a rather odd view of racing to the hare, who felt that he knew a thing or two about racing after his serial adventures with the farmer's hounds; but he kept his counsel, because he felt rather sorry for the tortoise.

"However," the latter was now saying, "you do make a good point. Would you agree to give me a head start?"

"Hang on," said the hare. "A head start to where? A race has to have a start and a finish."

"It does, does it?" The tortoise seemed amused. "Let's suppose a race goes from some place to some other place that's different. Then to move between those places, we can surely agree that at any moment one would have to be moving either from a spot or to a spot between them. Correct?"

The hare thought about this. His nose twitched as he worked it out, and this time the tortoise had the luxury of observing a cloud scud by overhead.

"I think so," said the hare at length.

"And," continued the tortoise carelessly, "at any moment one would have to be in a spot between the start and finish of the race, yes?"

The hare chewed pensively. His feet were much happier with racing than his brain.

"That seems right," he ventured.

"Well then," said the tortoise, "in that case, no matter where the start and finish are, or when we consider one's position, one has to either be in the place where one is and the place one just came from, or the place where one is and the place one is headed."

The hare's ears drooped.

"That can't be right," he said miserably.

"Oh it can," said the tortoise with placid contentment. "Unless of course movement is continuous and it's the instant that's an illusion. But then there's no reason to suppose that it means anything to say that at any moment anything's in any particular place. One might as well say one starts the race at the finish, since no moment's any more real than any other."

The hare hopped about unhappily in a circle. "You're confusing me," he said.

"Don't worry about it," enjoined the tortoise earnestly. "Let's pretend that it does matter and we actually do occupy some coordinate in spacetime."

The hare's eyes were glazing.

"I'm going to walk over here," said the tortoise, starting out on that journey, "and you can wait there."

He sauntered off, while the hare tried to work out if he had time for a snack and whether he might actually already be having one. The tortoise had upset his delicate sensibilities, and he was sorely in need of a radish.

Some minutes later, the tortoise hailed him, from a distance of some ten feet away.

"That should be enough of a headstart, don't you think?"

The hare looked doubtfully at the space between them.

"It doesn't seem very far," he suggested timidly.

"Oh but quite far enough," returned the tortoise. "Because now to win the race, you'll have to pass me. And to pass me you'll have to reach me."

"Yes..." said the hare, with the uneasy feeling that he was about to get a migraine.

"Of course, to reach me, you'll first have to get halfway here."

The hare thought about this. "Of course," he said, but he didn't sound certain.

"And naturally, to get there you'll have to go halfway first."

"... Naturally ..."

"And to get there you'll have to go halfway as well."

"I suppose so..."

"And in fact no matter how many times we divide that distance up, you'll always be able to divide it up one more time. For you to reach me, you'll have to first travel an infinitely short distance."

The hare extended a paw towards the tortoise, and hesitated, and withdrew it.

"Can't I just -?"

"Not logically," said the tortoise firmly. "In any case, even if you could start out, and even if having started out you could move from place to place... there's still the problem that you'll never catch up with me, let alone get past me."

The hare felt sure there was something badly wrong with this, but he couldn't put his paw on it.

"Because," explained the tortoise patiently, "even though I travel much slower than you, I am travelling at the same time as you are and on the same journey, albeit from a different start point. We're going in the same direction, is what I mean to say."

"But," blurted out the hare, "you're only ten feet away! I can cover that distance in no time!"

"On the contrary," sniffed the tortoise. "You can only cover that distance - or any distance - in some time. And in that time, I can cover some distance too. Oh, not nearly as much of course... but enough."

"You'd only go..." the hare struggled with mental arithmetic, "one foot."

"Correct!" said the tortoise delightedly. "And of course you'd cover that distance easily as well... but I'd have moved on..."

"... a tenth of a foot..." whispered the hare miserably.

"Quite so!" went on the tortoise. "And I know you'd cover that distance even quicker... but I'd have moved on another hundredth of a foot. Oh, you'd get very close," he smiled, "but you'd never catch me."

The hare scratched his other side. The smell of radishes was overwhelming.

"You win," he sighed, and hopped past the tortoise to get some food.

* * *

This concludes, only slightly late depending on how one measures these things, my personal A to Z challenge. I want to reiterate thanks to everyone who helped me along the way, and apologies to all of them, and more besides, for not getting out there and commenting more in return. It is my earnest hope that I'll be redressing that balance in coming days.

I also have a mailbox to compile, which I'll be getting around to hopefully tomorrow. I've been honored with an award, from a blogger I appreciate greatly but haven't done much to show that lately, so that needs to go up as well. Busy, busy, busy! PLUS the inaugural Mojo's Monthly Mindbender (which for May will have a musical and mathematical bent, since I might as well milk the alliteration for all it's worth) and perhaps the first tentative steps towards the Mojofesto, in preparation for November 2012. I eagerly await the inspirations and communications the blogosphere has in store for me over the coming thirty days - thanks for the ride so far, guys and gals!

S is for ... Shapiro Effect

Before I start in on the Shapiro effect, I want to talk about the origin of the Universe.

This could take a while. I hope you packed a thermos.

Actually, the concept of the thermos flask relates to current theories on the origin of the universe, in this way: both are the result of research into thermodynamics, the branch of physics that deals with energy and work. You may recall that the laws of thermodynamics were invoked, post facto, to discredit Orffyreus' perpetual-motion machine. They state, pretty clearly, that that sort of steady state is impossible in nature. The energy in a closed system is constant; but no machine can possibly be a closed system. Its energy comes from outside itself - even if only in the sense that it is manufactured, and so its component materials pre-exist its functioning self (existence precedes essence, in this case at least; the philosophical implications of that assertion, and its contrapositive, are beyond the scope of this blog, however). In general, any two systems in proximity to one another will undergo a heat exchange, until they reach a thermal equilibrium: an example of this can be seen if you leave a cup of hot coffee and a glass of iced tea out in the environment. After a sufficient period of time, the coffee and the tea will be the same temperature as one another: approximately the temperature of the ambient air around them.

Heat exchange occurs via three spontaneous processes: conduction, which is the transfer of heat down a heat gradient through matter, as when putting one end of a metal bar in a fire causes the whole bar to become hotter; convection, which is the transfer of heat within fluids along so-called convection currents, as evidenced by oceanic currents of warm water circulating from the Equator to the Poles; and radiation, which is the transfer of heat energy in the form of electromagnetic waves, as when the heat from the Sun warms the Earth. The Second Law of Thermodynamics reflects, without particularly explaining, an important aspect of this spontaneous heat exchange: it always travels down a heat gradient, so that hotter things spontaneously become cooler over time - in thermodynamic terms, the entropy of the system increases. Viewing the Universe as a vast closed system, within which the Earth is a smaller system, and a single human being a still smaller system within that, the implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that all things eventually fail and die; their energies are lost to the vastness of empty space, and ultimately the Universe succumbs to "heat death." Draw comfort from the fact that we are likely to be struck by devastating asteroids long before that dreadful moment arrives.

Thermodynamics, therefore, has important consequences for our understanding of Time, and in particular its monodirectional linearity from Past, to Present, to Future. Thermodynamics frames this subjective appreciation of the passing of time as a function of increasing entropy in the systems we observe. Of course, if Orffyreus was able to produce his perpetual motion machine for real - he smashed it when Willem 's-Gravesande, a supporter as it happened, tried to examine it to determine if this were so, so we'll never know now (at least not within a monodirectional linear time paradigm) - that has even more important consequences for thermodynamics, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

A thermos flask maintains the temperature of its contents much longer than usual by interposing a vacuum between them and the system containing the flask. Invented by James Dewar - the original patent was for a "Dewar bottle" - it thereby reduces heat loss via conduction or convection, since the fluid in the flask is insulated from the atmosphere around the flask by a vacuum that contains no matter and so has nothing to flow. Radiation can cross a vacuum, but a thermos flask has a highly reflective interior surface that reduces this. In practice, only the inconvenient fact that you have to be able to open the flask to introduce something into it, or indeed to drink something out of it, allows for any heat loss. Perhaps if the Dewar bottle were a Klein bottle, things might be different...

How does any of this relate to the origin of the Universe? Well, since the Universe hasn't already succumbed to heat death, and since we observe Time passing in accordance with thermodynamic predictions, we can conclude that the Universe isn't infinitely old; it exists within a finite Time (although there's a hidden petitio principii there). It had a Beginning; it will have an End. The prevailing cosmological view is that, something like thirteen billion years ago or so, all the matter and energy in the Universe today was condensed into a singularity, a dimensionless point that was tremendously potent and that exploded - the so-called Big Bang - in order to bring the Universe into being. Scientists are very sketchy about what prompted this Big Bang, and about what preceded it (not least because our notions of causality and linear time really hinge on the acceptance of the Big Bang theory and aren't applicable to anything that pre-existed it), but they do agree that it happened and that its force was sufficient to cause the rapid expansion of the Universe and power the formation of atoms, molecules, and eventually whole galaxies of matter. They even posit that most of the matter in the Universe is so-called "dark matter," invisible to electromagnetic radiation: a thermos flask made out of "dark matter" really would be a steady-state system, as long as nobody went and opened the thing. All of this provides a comforting bedrock underneath the scientific laws we build from everyday observations, and so has validity as a worldview on purely pragmatic grounds; but, science being what it is, harder evidence was required to support the theory when it was first proposed.

That evidence was first produced by Edwin Hubble, after whom the most powerful man-made telescope is named. Hubble's observations of massive and very distant galaxies demonstrated a phenomenon called 'redshift' - light perceived from those galaxies far, far away is redder than it ought to be, because the wavelengths of the light are increased. This corresponds to a decreased frequency of the light, or a reduced photon energy, depending on whether one views light as a wave or a particle (of course, like de Broglie, one can reject the excluded middle there and argue that it's both); Hubble reasoned that this redshift could be accounted for by the Doppler effect, which arises whenever there is relative movement between the source of a wave and some observer - you hear it with sirens from moving emergency vehicles, for example. Hubble's explanation for redshift allowed for calculations both of how far away these galaxies were and how fast they were moving, relatively, away from us; and that allowed an indirect estimate of the age of the universe. Also, theoretically, with enough data, the ability to pinpoint the location of the original Big Bang, although that hasn't been the subject of much scientific curiosity.

You'll have noticed this blog wasn't set up to be about the Doppler effect; and, indeed, there's another explanation for redshift that was proposed by Albert Einstein (who was not a fan of the expanding-universe paradigm). In linking classical Newtonian physics to his own theory of special relativity, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity argued that the velocity of light, commonly accepted as a 'speed limit' for the universe and a scientific constant, was in fact only constant absent gravitational effects: gravity bends light, according to Einstein, which is why the massive gravity of black holes make them invisible. Scientists accept the existence of all this massive invisible gravity in the universe - black holes and dark matter and so on - because otherwise the calculations extrapolated from their scientific laws don't tally with the observed amount of matter there is around. Given the choice between invalidating the assumptions of conventional science, and invalidating the universe it supposedly measures, scientists historically and routinely choose the latter, so it's not surprising that they're far happier with dark matter they can't see than a perpetual-motion machine they can see. Happily for conventional science, there is also other evidence out there that supports the assumptions Einstein made.

One of the more important items of evidence on that list was identified by Irwin R. Shapiro (yes, finally, we're about to discuss the Shapiro Effect). He it was who experimentally confirmed the predictions of Einstein's theory in 1964 by measuring a delay of 200 microseconds in radar signals bounced off the planets Venus and Mercury. This demonstration of the delay in electromagnetic radiation due to gravity provides an alternative explanation for redshift - not that the galaxies viewed are moving away from us, but that the light reaching us from them is being slowed by the gravitational pull of the intervening matter. Shapiro's result has been replicated many times since, for example with the transponders on the Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 space probes. The Viking Mars lander left transponders on the surface of that planet, which have also confirmed the Shapiro effect in operation.

There are, of course, a host of scientists in the mainstream who will explain at even greater length than I took here why the redshift phenomenon is still confirmation of the Big Bang hypothesis, and why the Shapiro effect doesn't discredit this evidence. I don't oppose them; I just find it interesting how the edifice of Science selectively disregards valid interpretations of the evidence its methods uncovers.