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Let’s say I put some meat and cheese in between two pieces of bread, and cut into two halves. When I cut, some crumbs and loose bits fall onto the table. If I take one half of the sandwich away, is what ‘remains’ still a sandwich? You say, “No, it’s only part of it.” So, I put my half back down, and you say, “Ok, now it’s a sandwich again.” So, ‘the sandwich’ is really just an ‘idea of the sandwich’, because the reunited halves are not the same as the pre-cut sandwich.
Now, science comes along and tells us that what we had called a sandwich only existed for a brief moment, because it underwent physical changes. But we don’t care, because we were only ever going to think of the sandwich according to our own ‘idea of the sandwich’.
And that’s pretty much how we view the world. We know better, we can describe better, we can explain better. But we just can’t seem to escape our tendency to cling to universal ideas of common objects.
In this sense, language works for us and against us. Whilst we evidently need nouns to communicate, we restrict our understanding of objects by conveniently excluding meaningful changes in, around, and through them.
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Russian researchers find more evidence to support notion that lightning is caused by cosmic rays
(Phys.org) —Russian physicists Alex Gurevich and Anatoly Karashtin claim, in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they have found more evidence to support their idea that lightning is caused by cosmic rays. The notion was first proposed by Gurevich back in 1992, and has been a source of debate ever since.
In first head-to-head speed test with conventional computing, quantum computer wins
(Phys.org) —A computer science professor at Amherst College who recently devised and conducted experiments to test the speed of a quantum computing system against conventional computing methods will soon be presenting a paper with her verdict: quantum computing is, “in some cases, really, really fast.”
Greenhouse gas level highest in two million years, NOAA reports (Update 2)
Worldwide levels of the greenhouse gas that plays the biggest role in global warming have reached their highest level in almost 2 million years—an amount never before encountered by humans, U.S. scientists said Friday.
Los Alamos reveals it’s been running quantum network for two and a half years
(Phys.org) —In a recent paper available on arXiv, a team of researchers at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory has revealed they’ve been running a quantum network for 2 1/2 years. The network is hub-and-spoke based, the team reports, and allows for perfectly secure messaging except at the hub.
Exotic atoms hold clues to unsolved physics puzzle at the dawn of the universe
An international team of physicists has found the first direct evidence of pear shaped nuclei in exotic atoms. The findings could advance the search for a new fundamental force in nature that could explain why the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter—-a pivotal imbalance in the history of everything.
Did the universe evolve to make black holes?
(Phys.org) —The maths underpinning Darwin’s theory of natural selection could explain how the universe may be ‘designed’ to make black holes.
Study finds semiclassical gravity counterintuitive, but on the horizon of testability
(Phys.org) —One of the more controversial theories of quantum gravity, which attempts to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, is semiclassical gravity, which was proposed in the 1960s. As its name suggests, semiclassical gravity involves a combination of quantum and classical components. Specifically, matter obeys the rules of quantum mechanics while gravity and the spacetime structure obey classical laws. Many physicists think that integrating quantum and classical systems in this way creates physical contradictions and mathematical inconsistencies. However, in a new paper, physicists have closely analyzed exactly how classical gravity might affect the quantum properties of macroscopic objects, and found that the effects of semiclassical gravity may be experimentally detectable with state-of-the-art technology.
Building a digital life form: OpenWorm, Open Source
(Phys.org) —The worm Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most widely studied creatures. Scientists consider the worm a model organism for exploring animal development including neural development. The reasons are basic; it has one of the most simple nervous systems, and is convenient for genetic analysis. Never mind that, in turn, there is already an enormous amount of biological data about the C. elegans; scientists are still seeking more answers about the worm. Now there is a novel information path, The OpenWorm Project. They are working up an artificial life form, computationally created, a digital life form as no other.
Boosting ‘cellular garbage disposal’ can delay the aging process, research shows
(Medical Xpress)—UCLA life scientists have identified a gene previously implicated in Parkinson’s disease that can delay the onset of aging and extend the healthy life span of fruit flies. The research, they say, could have important implications for aging and disease in humans.
Plants ‘talk’ to plants to help them grow
Having a neighborly chat improves seed germination, finds research in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Ecology. Even when other known means of communication, such as contact, chemical and light-mediated signals, are blocked chilli seeds grow better when grown with basil plants. This suggests that plants are talking via nanomechanical vibrations.
Genes show one big European family
From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent.
“When a Supreme Court Justice is about as equally uninformed as your local State Representative, we are reminded that this branch is democratically unaccountable, whimsical and interpretative, and subject to special interest. When crusty, old, influential men cling to power—just like in science—sometimes the best we can do is wait for them to die. And that’s a real shame.” — Nobody asked, Clarence Thomas.
“Academia is now consciously antithetical to wisdom, with no inherent correlation to intelligence or usefulness by any measurement. And we wonder why we’ve been overwhelmed by bureaucrats and public anti-intellectualism…”
Every year on 15 April, the US professional baseball organisation (the MLB) celebrates Jackie Robinson Day, in honour of the man who became the first African-American MLB player (in the ‘modern’ era of professional baseball). Before he took the field on this day in 1942, there had been an official “no-colored’s” policy. Naturally, today we celebrate his courage and perseverance. And that alone deserves more than its own day. But I wanted to briefly raise two broad sets of critically-relevant issues.
1) The real legacy of JR, or at least JR Day
I’m very much interested in the thoughts across the country today as people supposedly are reflecting on his legacy. What does it really mean to people that professional baseball felt forced to change its policy? Do people realise that the change in policy is an admission of error? And if it is an admission in error, why should the league celebrate its error? They now champion this man’s perseverance as their own, and have stolen the brand of anti-racism and have pinned it on their officially licensed kit. Whilst the MLB’s administrative leadership and personnel has obviously changed, I find it offensive that this is now being marketed as “We’re the MLB, the socially progressive think tank”; or “We’re the MLB, we overcame racism, with a little help from JR”. We all know that professional sports organisations always look for “themes” to draw spectators and viewers, so when Jackie Robinson’s name is attached to April 15th, and 2-FOR-1 Hot Dog night is scheduled for April 16th, the agony and tyranny of racism seems cheapened.
The MLB will deflect criticism, as they have, by saying, “Hey, we were just doing what everyone else was doing. Segregation was pervasive before the late 1960s. Can you really be angry at us, the MLB?” So the blame is, perhaps justifiably, spread out across society. And, that means that, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, from the smallest child to the eldest senior citizen, has to understand that WE ALL FUCKED UP on this. We as a society got it COMPLETELY WRONG. We thought black people were different, and did not deserve to be doing the same things we were doing. Objectively, the answer was 1, and we thought it was 0. No points awarded. Failure.
Hey, guess what? That was only a few decades ago. Is it possible—gasp—that we are doing things now, that are also objectively wrong? You see, April 15th is a day not just to honour a specific person who possessed the patience to look beyond traditionalist bigotry. April 15th is a day to remind us that the society that we are developing from is not necessarily the society that we want to honour. There are many quaint features about “the old days”, but “the old days” are often remembered selectively. Because our past contains objective errors, we should not assume that our present and future does not also contain such errors. Jackie Robinson Day is really one day on which we should try to remember that we are probably doing things incorrectly now, and that almost all of our efforts should be to find out what those things are. To assume that change is unnecessary is to stultify societal improvement.
2) Race as a construct: why days like JR Day should be more common
Beginning with basic biology, we now know that racial categories are exclusively instrumental: they have served to organise group identities and migratory movements via classification. We now know that outside of anthropological-biological-historical academia, race is purely an administrative convenience. Racial categories and racial identities are entirely meaningless, explaining about as much as someone’s star sign does.***** When someone wants to know what race you are, you should tell them to fuck off. I always leave my forms blank.
Nobody knows their entire biological history, and why should I label myself as something based on a few hundred years of ancestry entirely dependent on political map lines? We don’t know or care what person or group mixed with another, and any definition of identity is based on a fixed duration. I have European ancestors, but they had African ancestors. And they had oceanic ancestors. And, they may have had inorganic ancestors (abiogenesis) or extra-terrestrial ancestors (panspermia). So, why on earth should we care? Modern racial identities are vestiges from pre-scientific ideals: misapprehensions about the nature of biology and human culture.
The obstinacy of explicit racism—the actual belief that a particular, constructed group with a given, ascribed racial identity, is intrinsically inferior to, or at least intrinsically different from, another—is not just something that one should ridicule and admonish, but something that should also be seen as a means to learn about ourselves. We create these petty truth-claims. We want everything to have permanence, and permanent meaning. We are seemingly—or presently—incapable of seeing norms as temporary constructs, statistical approximations of what enough people hold to be true. We should always be ready to re-define, to re-examine, and to refine. We spend most our lives trying to establish things—careers, arguments, positions—so it will not be easy to strike this balance. But we have no choice…we need to try.
Jackie Robinson Day is about so much more than a cultural hero. It is, perhaps more importantly, about reminding ourselves that we craft our own societies. Because sometimes we are incorrect, and we have not seen things very clearly, we should expect change and revision. This does not require us to assume that the future will be better; it simply means that we have to work for it in the face of inevitable error. We cannot recreate some vision of the past, nor should we want to.
*****
{This does not mean that we are blank slates at birth, an antiquated idea that is demonstrably false. Genes, which change, and whose expression is dependent on local physical (including cultural) conditions, are dominant (though not exclusive) contributors to our biology and behaviour. Mapping groups of traits based on constructed racial identities, however, is purely instrumental and of very limited descriptive power, let alone explanatory power. Such an exercise would hold zero predictive power, considering our inability to perfectly know, let alone perfectly control or replicate, local physical conditions.}