Carl Sagan Sings!

A strange and compelling and downright geeky thing, that nevertheless I've been playing solidly for the last twenty minutes. I was given the book Cosmos as a kid and it's shaped everything since. Never since Sagan has science meshed so seemlessly with poetry.

Here's where you can find the original with some downloadables

Microsoft Surface

A small handful of Fridays ago, myself and my other half (she's taken to calling me 'other half' on her blog) took a trip through to Edinbrugh for part of this years Science Festival at the University of Edinburgh.  Of the two talks which were booked to take place at the intiguingly named department/building Informatics, the first was intended to be the future of computing, but a change in the programme meant the talk was about how the web works.

Most of the subject covered was familiar to me, though the presentation was brightly coloured, fun and definitely for the kids: most lectures on public key cryptography dont, I think, blow up a balloon full of hydrogen to demonstate a one-way function!  But I enjoyed myself and got to be a smartarse a number of times by guessing what was going to happen next.

Possibly the highlight, though not until much later when I'd mulled it over, was a practical demonstration of the weirdness of quantum phenomenon.  A laser was shone through a set of polarising filters.  The weird part is that the light which gets to the other end is brighter going through three filters than it is with two!  (An admittedly crude summary.)

As a sort of apology for not being the talk we expected, though not stated that way, the presenter - Chris Bishop of Microsoft Research - had one of the new Surfaces.  It's essentially a real world version of the computer display used by Ripley and the rest of the Marines in Aliens, where you can move objects and generally interact with it by touch.  (And as seen in countless movies since.)

I managed to get a quick play with it after the talk, jabbing it and making the demonstation picture ripple like water wherever I touched it.  Not quite the thrill of pressing down on a schematic of an atmosphere processing facility and declaring that the aliens are getting through the access ducts here, here and here, but pretty cool regardless.

Not that I'll be after one anytime soon, at apparently £7,000.  I wonder if they'd loan me one for use as a prop...

Edinburgh Book Festival

The Edinburgh book festival is now in full flow and I've just been along with Lesley to see Richard Dawkins (famous scientist) give a talk. All was going pretty much as expected, arrive early, see huge queue, guy with new iPhone (non-famous member of public) behind us, start going into the tent where the talk was being held. We found a seat and sat down. No problem, until this proved to be the very wrong seat indeed when Lesley spotted Iain Banks (famous author) having walked in as part of the audience.

The wrong seat, of course, was any seat that was not immediately adjacent to Iain Banks (famous Scottish author). Lesley happens to like Iain Banks (famous and clever Scottish author) a lot. So that was why the minutes leading up to Dawkin's talk consisted of observations of the form "Iain's taking his coat off", "Iain's looking around" and "Iain's looking at me!!!" (Disclaimer: Lesley is normally very *non-starstruck* and independent.)

The talk proved to be an interview chaired by Paula Kirby (famous, er, non-famous? I really have no idea) who started off by telling us that we'd be going into some less-travelled questioning. Most of the questioning stemmed from Richard's views on aliens, which itself came from an earlier debate in which he'd been consistently misrepresented. Even though it was outside his normal area of expertise, he spoke lucidly and at one point I wondered what must have been going through Iain Banks mind (famous clever Scottish Science Fiction author) as Richard explained that any real aliens would be vastly different in form to the old humanoid shape. Most science fiction writers don't have their aliens as being anything other than humanoid.

I wonder if Richard has read The Algebraist... but then Iain is most definitely not most science fiction writers. (Iain's giving his own talk on Wednesday, I'll have to ask him his thoughts - if I'm brave enough.) Dawkins is not most science fiction writers either; he revealed that his own story about aliens on the moon didn't follow the usual SF convention of having them speak English - the spoke French. But then he was seven at the time.

Most of the rest of the talk continued in on this theme, with a discussion of the Earth as a likely place for life and of multiverses. It was an unexpected avenue, and something which I am more familiar with than I would have been with biology. Of course it was all discussed with reference to scientific explanation versus "God did it", the result being entirely fascinating, even mentioning Fermi's Paradox. At that point I couldn't help thinking how amazing a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Baxter (another famous science fiction author) might have been.

Myself and Lesley were half expecting Iain to ask a question during the subsequent Q&A, but he remained silent. I thought that the questions from the audience were rather more interesting (and of course wider ranging) that Paula's questions, which really just stuck to the same theme.

So I'm blogging this from a pub a few streets down from the book festival and there's a lot of events still to go this week, including one about blogging.

Basic Assumption

Last year I got drawn into a debate on a forum, though not here on Intrepid, concerning the power of science as an explanation for everything. Some people considered science to be little more than a “guess” and naturally my opposing position was that the scientific method leads to a pretty good understanding of the world. As an explanations go, nothing can surpass it. Also, it works. My example was James Clerk Maxwell, a shy, awkward Scotsman who in 1865 formulated some equations with which he'd intended to demonstrate the link between electricity and magnetism. Having successfully done this, a closer look at the same equations also seemed to be saying something new: not only were they linked, the combination of the electrical and magnetic force ought to travel through space.

And that was how radio waves were discovered.

The forum debate concerned, inevitably, religion and the bible and why those provided a better explanation of the world than science. I made the challenge of explaining how it was possible to deduce the existence of radio waves from a reading of the bible. God, as a reason for the world, doesn't have any explanatory depth. “Why?” leads to “Just because.” now and forever. One of the responses was quite sizeable, and this is what leads me to the point I really wish to make.

So large was it that I saved it to disk in order to create a riposte at leisure, but as it happened I slowly realised that I had little idea where to start with it and put it off for a day or so. Eventually I never subsequently found the time to create a coherent answer, and so I fell away from the debate entirely. But now I know what it was that threw me so badly. By co-incidence (and I use that word without any of the irony that it seems to have acquired in modern times) I bought a book within a few weeks of that debate which threw some light on that response, though it took me months to come to really appreciate it.

Called How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, it described at length some economic, political and social fads over the last thirty years or so, some of which were very surprising. Mostly, if I read a book like this – such as The New Apocrypha – I imagine that it will cover some of the more traditional targets such as ghosts, UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. Here was something quite different. Although the subject matter was not directly supernatural, it did demonstrate how little critical thinking there is in all areas of life. I was surprised to find self-help and business books in general described as a con. Just dress up completely obvious banalities in the language of he mystic – even pretending to be channelling wisdom from dead gurus - and rake in the cash.

So far, all very refreshing to read, but nothing that shed any light on my debate. Until the chapters about post-moderists, I had always used the term post-modern in a loosely colloquial sense of meaning the kind of movie that references itself and was quite aware that it was a movie. A harmless stylistic indulgence in fact. And now here was something which finally threw some light on that response to my message, which I had been unable to make headway with.

An example from How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World:
“Luce Irigaray, a high priestess of the movement, denounced Einstein's E=mc2 as a 'sexed equation', since it 'privileges the speed of light over other [less masculine] speeds that are 'vitally necessary to us'”

Post Moderism, in its full uncut flavour, treats science, society, history, indeed everything as a “text” whose interpretation is no more or less valid than any other interpretation. In essence, meaning and experience are no longer objective. Of course there is much subtly and shifting of definitions between observers, but the implications slowly sunk in as I read and re-read the rest of the book, then confirmed it with a little more research. When I'm in a debate with someone who provides me with a response of the kind I got, it means my basic assumption is wrong.

My basic assumption is that reasoning is a valid tool with which to think about the world. Astonishingly, incredibly, there are people who reject the idea of logical reasoning, indeed reasoning altogether, as being a proper thing to use when describing reality. The responders message now makes more sense to me, even if only on its own terms, and that is why I doubt I could ever rejoin that particular debate. Because all I was doing was bringing some logic to the party.

And who on Earth was going to fall for that one