Tag Archives: Science

Books, Science

To Explain the World by Steven Weinberg

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To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg, is a history of science. As he states at the very beginning, it isn’t necessarily to track our progress in science, though that naturally comes along for the ride, but rather “how we came to learn how to learn about the world.” He isn’t interested in how well the ancient Greeks did in their efforts to understand the world so much as how they did as scientists. Did they apply a scientific method? Did they perform tests of their ideas to try to validate them? Did they leave the realm of pure hypothesizing and look for real world implications of their ideas? Weinberg concludes that, for the most part, no, the Greeks weren’t much of scientists.

This is a different and often-times refreshing look at the history of science. By focusing less on what was learned and more on how it was learned, Weinberg takes us on a journey of what it means to do science. How has science, in a broader sense, evolved? How have we used it to understand the world around us?

Along the way, there are lots of examples of scientific discovery and how we did learn specific things about the universe. While Weinberg’s intention is that one doesn’t need much math to follow, the truth is that many of these concepts are rather challenging and require some time to think about them (more than I often devoted to them). Particularly when considering some of the ideas of the ancients, in which they built complex and clumsy scaffolds to support hypotheses that, for example, the Earth was the center of the universe, the more complex the model, the harder it is to get one’s head around it. He does provide an appendix of sort that goes into some of these in more detail, but unless one has pencil and paper at hand to work through them in detail, even these are less than intuitive.

However, this does bring me to one of the coolest experiences with this book. In one of the appendices, he describes a proof for Thales’ Theorem, which says that if we have a circle and a diameter, and we create a triangle from any point on the circle and the intersections of the diameter with the circle, the triangle is a right triangle. I described this proof to my daughter and she got so excited when she understood and was able to reproduce the proof. She genuinely loved the idea of being able to prove something like that.

So, there is a lot of love of science and the joy of discovery in this book. As the human race learned more about the universe around them, they also learned how to learn, to, essentially, do science. Weinberg describes this journey as a stern parent might, critiquing how far away those ancients (and not so ancients) were from true science, how they were so close but missed a key element. He isn’t criticizing, per se, but rather evaluating whether we should truly call what they were doing science.

He has a number of interesting observations about the scientific endeavor that he makes along the way, most of which I agree with:

  • “Inspiration and aesthetic judgment are important in the development of scientific theories, but the verification of these theories relies finally on impartial experimental tests of their predictions.”
  • “The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.”
  • “Nothing about the practice of modern science is obvious to someone who has never seen it done.”
  • “Science is now international, perhaps the most international aspect of our civilization.”
  • “Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.”

These last two, in particular, resonate strongly with me. We do science for science’s sake, to learn, to push the boundaries of knowledge. Some of that science may turn into useful technology, but that might not happen for decades or longer. And science is the one view of the world that has become international, embraced by parts of pretty much every culture and society in the world. It is a way of discovering knowledge that can truly be called universal.

Weinberg goes pretty deep into various aspect of Greek and Arabic knowledge, more than I want to capture here. (He does make an interesting reference to the Arab’s contribution to science: “For while in the East al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy, their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were dabbling in the art of writing their names.”) Again, the goal is to put that knowledge into context, to show how scientific their approaches to generating that knowledge was. Some of their achievements are truly amazing, and Weinberg highlights those. But, he is really interested in how they made those achievements. And, in most cases, he concludes it wasn’t really scientifically.

It wasn’t until Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, where a predictive model of the solar system was developed based on simple laws, that what we might call modern science came to be. These scientists took observations, built models that matched them, and tested them. Galileo was an important forefather of this as he did laboratory experiments to test his ideas, not relying simply on observation of the natural world. These developments ushered in the age of science.

Overall, this was an excellent journey through the history of human learning, of the development of our abilities to do science. Along the way, there are lots of interesting tidbits of scientific (and not-so-scientific) discovery and understanding. I highly recommend it to any student of science. It provides not only context for how and why we do science, but captures that joy and spirit of discovery that drives a lot of scientific pursuit.

Books

The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

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The goal of writing is to communicate. It’s as simple as that. If you can understand what I’m saying, that should be what matters. Of course, if I say it elegantly, that is a bonus as it makes reading a bit more enjoyable. But, if so-called rules get in the way of elegant prose, we should simply abandon them.

That is the essential message of The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. This is a style guide for today. Pinker is a famous cognitive psychologist and linguist and he comes at style from that perspective. Do the rules that we learn in grammar school make any sense? Where did they come from? Do they really help make an English sentence or paragraph more intelligible? In many cases, Pinker concludes, the answer is no. Many rules were arbitrary edicts by almost random “authorities” who had no real reason to establish those rules. For example, the idea that you can split a verb with an adverb, the so called split infinitive, comes from the idea that English has to obey the same rules as Latin, an unrelated language.

I admit, The Sense of Style aligns well with my own perspective on writing. To me, the most important thing is the logic of the prose, not the faithfulness to these rules. I do want my writing to be entertaining and easy to follow, but I don’t want to be beholden to rules that make that task more difficult, not easier. The Sense of Style provides that kind of guidance. It is actually targeted more to people who write more technical or non-fiction works, such as scientists, but the lessons Pinker tries to impart are useful for any writer. In this sense, however, Pinker focuses on “classic writing” as a style to best convey information to the reader. “Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.” How often have we read something and felt like we weren’t smart enough to understand what the writer was trying to say?

Pinker takes aim at so-called language fundamentalist, the people who decry the death or the bastardization of the language, people who treat traditional rules of usage as the Ten Commandments: “as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation.” But, as Pinker points out, many of these rules have no sound logic or reason behind them. He goes after many of the tropes we learn in school — you can’t use an intensifier with certain words (like very unique), you can’t split the infinitive, you can’t have dangling modifiers, and never use the passive voice are just a few examples. But, beyond going after these rules, Pinker gives concrete advice on writing. Maybe the best advice is to be aware of and avoid the “curse of knowledge,” the fact that you, as a writer, have been thinking about your subject for so long, you may not realize what is obvious and what isn’t and fail to convey enough information to the reader to make your points clear and logical. “The ability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.” “The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.” And, finally, “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”

From my perspective, the only weakness of The Sense of Style, and maybe it is more my own weakness, is that there are sections where, to really understand them, one needs a greater grasp of English grammar — the kind of knowledge that ones needs to diagram a sentence — than I possess. So, in some ways, it gets a little technical in the middle. The goal is to show how the logic of sentences are really crafted, and that is critical, but some of the descriptions are a bit too opaque for me. Maybe with more time to go through those sections and digest the content, it would be clearer.

However, these sections are made up for by very practical parts where Pinker goes through common “rules” and even misused words to really explain which rules and exhortations are based on sound thinking and which ones were arbitrarily made. My conclusion is that most fall in the latter category and can be safely ignored when writing, but Pinker is not shy in defending those that truly make writing better and have some grounding in the logic of the language. So, a lot of what Pinker advocates for is not rules of grammar, but rules of logic. He bases his arguments on how the human brain deals with words and concepts and how writing should minimize taxing that brain so that the reader achieves maximum comprehension. He emphasizes that coherence and logic in constructing sentences, paragraphs, and documents is critical to catch and keep the attention of the reader. “In other words, a writer has to have both something to talk about (the topic) and something to say (the point).”

Thus, The Sense of Style is also very practical, with examples of bad sentences and how to fix them. I’m tempted to buy this book for all of my postdocs, as I think the guidance is very good. My only hesitation stems from the bits I mentioned above, about diagraming sentences, but I expect that most foreign language speakers are better at this than native English speakers as it seems they learn this better. I think that a more abbreviated version of The Sense of Style would be an excellent idea, one that makes the points but a little more concisely and can be used as a reference. That said, I know of many scientists that could benefit from the advice contained in this book, myself included.

Let me end with a quote, where Pinker recalls an editorial that appeared in the New York Sun in the 1920s. The editors were responding to an effort to ban phrases like “different than X” in favor of “different from X,” the editors said “The excellent tribe of grammarians, the precisians who strive to be correct and correctors, have as much power to prohibit a single word or phrase as a gray squirrel has to put out Orion with a flicker of its tail.”

Books, Science

Boltzmann’s Atom by David Lindley

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It might be hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 1800s, the scientific community was beginning to think it had more or less wrapped up all-things physics. Newton’s mechanics were well understood and Maxwell had recently shown how light behaved as a wave, giving a unified theory of electricity and magnetism. Little could they all imagine that everything would be turned on its head in just a few short years.

Presaging this transformation of physics was Ludwig Boltzmann, who was one of the leading figures of what we now call statistical mechanics. He showed how we could move beyond treating individual particles and think about them as large groups, think about their average properties. This allowed him to consider the properties of solids and liquids and gases on a scale that more directly connects with every day life. Maybe most importantly, he showed how the properties of these groups, or ensembles, of particles connected to the concept of entropy, which was a fairly vague concept before him. His impact to physics is immeasurable, and is enshrined in various concepts that bear his name, not least amongst them being the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and the Boltzmann factor.

However, during his life, his ideas were not so quick to catch on and were, in particular, challenged by people like Ernst Mach (yes, the one who devised the Mach scale of speed), who exposed a view that physics should only describe what is directly observed, that there was no room for theorizing what caused those observations. That, combined with Boltzmann’s relative isolation in a small university and his own near-schizophrenia with his status, led to a relatively slow acceptance of his ideas. Boltzmann’s ideas had, at their core, the concept of atoms, a concept that was not at all widely accepted during his time. As late as 1897, leading scientists such as Mach could exclaim “I don’t believe that atoms exist!”

Of course, there were theories of atoms before Boltzmann, dating back to the ancient Greeks. Lindley traces the development of our theories of atomic particles and Boltzmann’s contributions to those theories. Boltzmann’s own theoretical advances made predictions, based on the assumption of atoms, that were later validated and helped conclusively show that atoms do indeed exist (Einstein also played a critical role with his theory of Brownian motion). That Boltzmann’s assumptions were fundamentally correct was not a given, and that they led to predictions that agreed with observation did not prove them to be true. As Lindley notes: “You make an assumption and explore the consequences. This is exactly what scientists continue to do today, and the fact that a certain assumption leads to all kinds of highly successful predictions and explanations does not, strictly speaking, prove that the original assumption is correct.“

Lindley’s portrait of Boltzmann is both the story of a man who had some very profound personal issues and the history of a branch of science that presaged the quantum revolution. The story of the advancement of science is fascinating in its own right, as generations of scientists tried to tease out what, at the microscopic scale, was driving the macroscopic observations we make every day. Lindley describes the scientific environment of the time, in which a few big heavyweights dominated the discourse. A single scientist, working in relative isolation, like Boltzmann, could make huge impacts on his field. This isn’t as true today, where we seem to be delving more into details than bigger swaths of truth. Not that there aren’t any new big truths to discover, but rather that the kinds of technological advances that are rewarded demand digging into the details. And, the democratization of science — the shifting of science being a rich-man’s hobby to a true profession pursued by large armies of people — have made it so that it is harder to stand out in the proverbial field.

As for himself, Boltzmann was never happy. He always desired more recognition for his achievements and that typically meant moving to bigger and better positions at other universities. However, the moment he accepted such a position, he was riddled with doubts and often tried to undo the appointment. Particularly in Austria, where appointments were at least brought to the attention of the royals, this led to some level of infamy for the poor man. His vacillations were likely a reflection of some deeper level of depression or other mental condition, as he ultimately took his own life.

Finally, Lindley also provides some metacommentary on the scientific process itself. This is both through the continual argument between people like Mach and Boltzmann (Mach particularly disliked theorizing, stating, for example, that “the object of natural science is the connection of phenomena, but theories are like dry leaves which fall away when they have ceased to be the lungs of the tree of science“) as well as his own observations: “Science demands an element of creativity, and an element of faith. The creativity comes in thinking up hypotheses and theories that no one has ever thought of before. The faith comes in thinking that these hypotheses, when shown to be useful or successful in some way, bear a relation to what is loosely called reality.” Late in his life, Boltzmann, spurred on by the attacks by Mach and his followers, turned toward philosophy, in an attempt to understand the nature of truth. However, he never really became a philosopher, telling a colleague “Shouldn’t the irresistible urge to philosophize be compared to the vomiting caused by migraines, in that something is trying to struggle out even though there’s nothing inside?“

Altogether, Boltzmann’s Atom is an excellent portrait of a man and of an era in science. It is a lesson in how science advances, not necessarily through the unstoppable march of progress, but in fits and spurts as different personalities come and go. Boltzmann himself is an intriguing figure that bridges two different eras of science. We tend to forget both that science doesn’t always follow an obvious linear path in the search for understanding and that the people that push it forward are human with very human foibles. Boltzmann’s Atom reminds us of both.

Books, Quotes, Science

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

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Growing up, my hero was Thomas Jefferson. Here was a man who seemingly did it all: he was of course a leading figure in the founding of our nation, but he was also a gifted writer and a deep thinker, embracing a scientific view of the world. He founded the University of Virginia and, as president, drastically expanded the lands that would eventually become part of the United States. He seemed the epitome of a so-called Renaissance man.

However, as with most things, as I got older, I learned that Jefferson was a much more complex figure, full of contradictions. In the Declaration of Independence, he penned “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” yet, he owned slaves. In fact, he had an ongoing relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, with whom he fathered several children. He presented a face of aloofness to politics, seemingly above the pettiness of parties, but, behind the scenes, he was actively engaged in attacking rivals and disparaging other ideas. He was against centralized Federal power until he held it and solidified it significantly. He was terribly afraid of what others thought about him but he continued to search out the central position of national affairs.

The point of Jon Meacham’s The Art of Power is to delve into the mind of Jefferson, to explore the seeming contradictions, to understand the full person. Meacham’s goal isn’t to describe in detail all of Jefferson’s accomplishments. In fact, major events such as the revolution, Jefferson’s time in France, even his presidency are, effectively, only briefly described. Rather, it is Jefferson’s innermost thoughts that Meacham tries to probe, mostly through Jefferson’s copious correspondence and the thoughts of his contemporaries. A complex picture arises of a man who, at his core, has two primary drives: he wants to be a great man and he wants the American experiment to succeed.  He needed power and control. He needed to shape his life and society to his vision of them.

It is perhaps this that best explains Jefferson’s political life. He was so afraid that Americans, particularly the Federalists such as Adams, would revert to a monarchy of some form — worse, rejoin Britain — that he made it a key mission in his life to subvert such efforts. He felt that an educated people would make the right decision, that education begat reason and that, in turn, would lead to a good government. He expounded “the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters” and that “reason, not revelation or unquestioned tradition or superstition, deserved pride of place in human affairs.” However, he knew that an uneducated public was a danger: “if the members are to know nothing but what is important enough to be put into a public message… it becomes a government of chance and not design.” To make informed decisions, people must be informed. “In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.”

The contradictions in Jefferson’s life are best embodied in his views on slavery. It seems that he did make some admittedly small efforts to end slavery, or at least mitigate it, but, after a few defeats, he gave up. He didn’t advocate for outright freedom, but emancipation and deportation. He didn’t believe that the two races could live side by side. He realized that the institution of slavery would lead to a crisis, but he, along with many of his contemporaries, decided to punt on the issue of slavery in favor of establishing an imperfect United States. The country would later suffer greatly for this, but, in his mind, there would have been no country if they hadn’t gone this route. Perhaps Jefferson’s biggest failing is that, while he tried so hard to exert his views and meld society to his vision in other aspects, he simply “chose to consider himself powerless” over the issue of slavery. Even in his personal life, he didn’t act on his principles, only freeing those slaves which were his own children (by an arrangement with Sally when she lived with him in France to guarantee her return with him). This is where Jefferson, as a hero, comes crashing down the hardest. This isn’t simply a case where Jefferson was no less enlightened than his peers. There were many who advocated for the end of slavery. Some of his fellow Virginians freed their slaves. Emancipation was not a foreign concept, something that hadn’t even crossed their minds. As Meacham says “Jefferson was wrong about slavery,” even from a contemporary perspective.

His personal life was often filled with days of scientific inquiry. He had an enlightened view on experimentation, stating that “I have always thought that if in the experiments to introduce… new plants, one species in a hundred is found useful and succeeds, the ninety-nine found otherwise are more than paid for.” Further, he knew that not all discoveries immediately led to an amazing new application. He advocated for science for its own sake: “The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third and so on through a course of time, until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.” This is a view that science requires sustained effort and encounters much failure for every success, a view that we would do well to continue to adopt in our own times.

Jefferson spoke a strong game when in the political opposition, arguing against any centralization of power and against a strong centralized government. He was a pure democrat. But, upon gaining power, he didn’t hesitate to use it. As Meacham says “It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.” This seems to be an insight we could take to heart today. We are often swayed by idealistic arguments about how the government should work, about how society should work, but we neglect the actual difficulties of governing. We are given platitudes about how things will change, but then are frustrated when they don’t change enough. This is how it has been since the founding of the country and is not likely to change any time soon.

Most intriguingly, Jefferson seemed to have a good perspective on his place in history. He was certainly very proud of his achievements, but he also knew that history would inflate them, would place the achievements of his generation on a pedestal to be almost worshipped. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and supposed what they did to be beyond amendment… I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions… but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Jefferson knew that people and societies change and that their laws must change with them.

This book isn’t exactly an overview of Jefferson’s life. Rather, it tries to delve into his motivations, his thoughts, using his own words. It tries to understand what drives him. At times, it is a little frustrating in that the context isn’t fully fleshed out — the historical backdrop isn’t always clearly presented, but rather assumed — though to fully paint the picture would have led to an enormous volume. Further, there is no deeper analysis of what Jefferson was thinking. In some sense, he is simply presented, with all of his contradictions. That we can’t delve deeper is frustrating, but the simple fact of the matter is that this is the best we can do. We don’t have him here to talk to, so we can only analyze what he wrote and what others wrote about him. Thus, we are left with an imperfect portrait of an imperfect man, one who stood above others in many ways, but who certainly had his own failings. As Meacham says, “He was not all he could be. But no politician — no human being — ever is.”

I certainly gained a new appreciation for Jefferson, both his accomplishments and the motivations behind them. As an adult, I know no human is perfect and no one can be held up on an unquestioned pedestal. Jefferson, as part of the generation that led to the American experiment, is a great man, a man that is inspiring both for the depth of his thoughts and the breadth of his activities. He is also a small man, for his failures. He is a real human who made enormous sacrifices in some domains of his life but was unable to make others that were equally important. Is he my hero? No. But he is still a man I can admire, understanding that he was, as we all are, a flawed human being.

A few other Jeffersonian snippets I thought worth sharing:

  • We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.
  • Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
  • Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind.
  • [Good humor] is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment’s consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions which will conciliate others and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!
Books, Science

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn by Amanda Gefter

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This book is thought-provoking.

When she was fifteen, Amanda Gefter’s father, while out to dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant, asked her “How would you define nothing?” Her father had been thinking about the nature of reality and he had come to the conclusion that it was nothing. Or better said, Nothing. This question led Amanda on a journey, both of personal development and to understand the true nature of reality. She delved deep into what physics said about reality. Along the way, in her mind masquerading as a journalist, she interviewed and discussed physics with leading physicists. She delved deep into what the cutting edge of science said about the nature of reality. And, along the way, she discovered her own voice, writing a book detailing her journey.

Gefter’s knowledge and insight about the nature of reality, and the excitement she conveys as she learns it, is simply inspiring. As she tries to uncover what physics says objective reality truly is, she slowly finds, step by step, that nothing is objective. Beginning with relativity that said that time and gravity are relative, and through quantum mechanics, that tells us that even measurements are relative, she examines what we know, what the gaps in our knowledge are, and what that uncompromisingly leads us to conclude about reality. There is no objective reality. Every observer essentially has their own reality, their own definition of the universe.

She jumps into how that means a universe could arise out of literally nothing. As no observer can know everything about the universe, as our views are limited and finite, it puts bounds on the information we can each collect. That bound essentially leads to the formation of the universe, a shadow that arises out of nothingness. I don’t completely understand it, and not sure I buy it all, but the steps by which she gets there are all based on what our science tells us.

In any case, her examination of the science itself is fascinating. I was unaware of what the most recent developments in cosmology, string theory, and quantum mechanics were concluding. Her excitement in discovery each new twist and turn is infectious. And, along the way, she gives great perspectives of the leading thinkers in this area.

This book is humbling.

Gefter has no formal science training. Her father, though a medical doctor, is not a physicist. But, these two delve so deep into questions regarding the nature of reality, it is simply humbling for someone like me who has studied physics. Granted, I went in a different direction, focusing on the properties of atoms and materials, but still, that these two have the curiosity, the drive, and the deep intuition to really delve into these questions is inspiring. I’m inspired to try to delve deeper into my own fields, beyond the every day drivers of doing practical science. We’ll see if I’m able to follow through.

The ideas that Gefter explores, that she describes, are hard concepts  and I admit that I struggle with many of them. Most of them arise from simply considerations, typically from seeming paradoxes where some assumption leads to contradictions about how reality must be. In each case, those assumptions must be abandoned and soon we are left with very few. The chain of reasoning and evidence that leads to the final picture is well described, but they ideas are challenging. To fully grasp them, I know I will need to read further.

This book is touching.

Gefter is set on her quest by her father’s question and his own ruminations on the nature of reality. She is both accompanied and followed by her father on this quest as she makes it her own. But, the way Gefter and her father conspire as this journey unfolds, the way they discuss their most recent insights, the way they work together to delve into these deepest of questions, is, in some sense, maybe what all parents dream of. Gefter’s father inspires his daughter to undertake the quest of a lifetime. And she takes it beyond what he could have ever done on his own. The deep intellectual relationship between the two, the shared vision, is something that I could only dream of passing along to my own daughter.

This book is awesome.

The way Gefter explores the nature of reality, the way she starts on her quest knowing literally nothing about the physics of cosmology, quantum mechanics, and relativity, and reaches into the deepest understanding we have, is a great way to convey what we know about reality. She systematically crosses off elements of what might comprise reality and delves deeper and deeper into the seeming paradoxes that arise as our science progresses. I certainly learned a great deal, and the ideas presented are thought provoking in a way that is rare in such books. As opposed to other books on cosmology and string theory, this one doesn’t necessarily take a side or advocate for a certain perspective. Instead, Gefter is really trying to understand what we know and what science tells us about reality. And, in doing so, she produces one of the most entertaining and educational forays into modern physics I’ve had the pleasure of reading.

The ideas that arise from modern physics are mind bending. They push the limits of our ability to understand the world around us. They are beyond our wildest imagination. Science is often criticized for its lack of creativity, but modern physics has created a view of the world and reality that could never have simply been imagined, never dreamed up.