Candles and Constants

I've got something interesting for you, probably the Biggest Thing of All. However, getting there took more explanation than I thought it would... 


But first, an odd observation: In early cloud chambers physicists would see evidence of paired particles popping out of nothing into existence. They were always particle-anti-particle pairs and they always flew off in opposite directions, so conservation of momentum was conserved. But to conserve mass-energy (remember the old Einstein mass-energy equivalence equation Energy = Mass times the velocity of light squared), you had to assume that there was an energy there before the particles appeared. That energy exists even in a vacuum - and this is where Vacuum Energy got its name. 

Another observation: There are supernovae of a certain type (Type Ia) that blow up in very predictable ways.  These are stars of a very large mass, and their explosions are so predictable that they are used as "Standard Candles". That term stems from how bright is a "standard" candle as seen from a given distance... a century and a half ago. The idea is that if something always blows up the same way, and gives off the same amount of light each time, then the dimmer it was the farther away it was. This was perfect for astronomers, because while there are other Standard Candles out there (Cepheid Variables for one), Type Ia supernovae can be seen and measured a whole lot farther away.

Hang in with me here, this really is going someplace, I promise.

In the 1930's, Edwin Hubble (the guy the space telescope was named after) figured out that a lot of the "fuzzy" objects visible in early telescopes were really giant galaxies like the Milky Way. This was a pretty humbling observation, because just a few centuries earlier, humankind thought IT was the center of all creation... and now humankind realized that it occupied a small stony planet in an insignificant solar system in the middle fringes of an average-sized galaxy... and there were millions of galaxies. Quite a come-down.



But Hubble was more fascinated than bothered. He observed that the farther away these galaxies were, the redder was the light coming from them. For anyone who has heard a siren pass by them and noticed the pitch drop, this is called the Doppler Shift. No, it wasn't named after someone named Shift, either. The equivalent of the siren sound dropping in pitch is light turning redder if something is moving away. The faster you go, the lower the pitch, and you can relate those two with a constant number multiplier. If the galaxy was coming toward you, a galaxy would have a blue shift... but ALL galaxies had RED shifts - so they were all receding.

Ever bake a loaf of raisin bread?  As the loaf rises, ALL the raisins are moving away from each other in all directions. The farther away a pair of raisins were to start with, the faster they move away from each other as the loaf rises.  Galaxies and raisins: pretty much the same thing.

At that time it still wasn't certain how big the Hubble Constant was, but Ed took a stab at it: something between 40 and 70. In a nicely-behaved universe, the Hubble Constant would relate how FAR something was by how RED the light coming from it was. In other words, how much the Hydrogen-Alpha absorption line in a solar spectrum was shifted down into the red range, multiplied by Ed's Number, would tell you how far away the galaxy was. At that point of time in science history, everyone knew about the Big Bang theory, and this seemed to prove that it was the winner over its big rival, the Steady-State theory. So... if you could narrow down the Hubble Constant, you could also get a handle on when things started flying apart. In the last few decades, the age of the universe has been narrowed down to about 13.4 billion years.

What came before that?  Good question to ask an atheist.

OK, if things are flying apart, and there is gravity acting on the same things, then the expansion should be slowing down - as gravity exerts its inevitable pull on those things.

Pretty straight-forward, right? Some people speculated that when gravity finally took over, everything would collapse back onto itself into something called the Big Crunch: the End of the Universe.

Turns out that everyone was 'way wrong on that one.  I can't WAIT to read tomorrow's blog to find out!

~~~~~

Sunday

Last Sunday I was in an Airbus crossing the continent for some meetings that started in Reston, VA, on Monday morning.  Whenever I miss Church I feel a deficit - something is missing.  It's like forgetting to put my cell-phone on charge the night before, but the internal loss is more so.

Years ago, I was the USGS Science Mission Chief in southern Venezuela.  I was resident there with two other American geologists and their families, and I had responsibility for the work and logistics as well as for the safety of up to 12 "TDY" (Temporary Duty) scientists each year. They would come down for 1 - 3 months at a time to help us and our Venezuelan Tecmin counterparts map the roadless, jungle-covered southern half of the country.

Because I was responsible for their safety as well as for directing them, every time a geologist took a helicopter into the jungle - or moved camps - I would be there with a Nomex flightsuit and a helmet.  This was especially critical for Venezuela, where the pilots were as spotty as the maintenance on the aircraft.  These were so dangerous that by the third year we were doing most of our entradas in dugout canoes.

By a coincidence, I had to do this three Sundays in a row, and it was really getting me down. Finally, I asked my stake president (I was his 1st counselor) for permission to administer the Sacrament to myself. Surprised, he said yes, certainly. It gave me an opportunity to explain about Keys to this only-three-year member of the Church - and how critically important they were.

I pulled off the side of the road to Tumeremo in the southern jungle just before sunrise; Tumereno was our Tecmin helicopter base. I opened and read from Section 20 of the D&C, and I administered the Sacrament to myself using a canteen and a small pancito (a small French bread roll about the size of a hot dog bun).

As I finished, I looked to my left and the Sun was just rising; the sky was a glorious riot of color. Only then did I realize that it was Easter Sunday. Someone reached out and touched my mind, and I cried like a baby.  I've never forgotten that special morning, and since then Sunday is more special to me - and especially Easter Sunday.

~~~~~

You Bet Your Life

I wrote an article for the American Jujitsu Association newsletter several years ago with that title. My point: there are over 850 different Jujitsu techniques cataloged within Budoshin Jujitsu. You could spend your entire life trying to learn them all - but that wouldn't be very pragmatic. Instead, I encourage my students to perfect those that work for them - work on the ones you would bet your life on. For instance, a shorter student naturally can get off a hip-throw on a larger person (and thoroughly trash an attacker) much easier than the other way around. Why, then, would one of my 6"1' (185 cm) blackbelt assistant instructors even bother with working on it? Mainly, so he can teach it to the 5'1" (155 cm) female student who is so good at it now that she is already a brown belt - almost a blackbelt herself.

If it isn't pragmatic - if it doesn't work - I'm not interested in wasting time on it.

I feel the same way about my LDS religion. Does it work for me 168 hours per week?

I require that.

The things that are most attractive to me about LDS doctrine are that it is self-consistent - no loose threads, no Limbo elements - and it is utterly pragmatic. Don't get me wrong - Joseph Smith himself pointed out that fully a third of the Book of Mormon was sealed and unavailable to him... and that some knowledge was available to individuals only after much pondering and personal revelation.  For me, this included an off-the-wall thing like knowing if a nuclear holocaust would happen between the US and Russia. Until the 1990's this was a persistent residual worry in my life; this was one of those things that was important to me, if not others. I got an answer, which (also as a fundamental and elegant part of LDS doctrine) I am permitted to share only with my family. The basic stuff is all there, though, and it works for everyone who cares to think about it.

The LDS doctrinal philosophical framework works for me in the most pragmatic way: it makes me happy. It is also consistent with my lifetime experience - how things work in the world, and how it makes the wonderful and sad things of life all make sense.  I have a means to fit them into a larger context: they all fit into one greater whole.

I'm quite content to bet my life on it.

Is my LDS belief system conformable with science? Insofar as science understands things, absolutely. That's another requirement. A key issue here, however, is that science is an evolving understanding of things real.  Some scientists have a myopic view that the current version of scientific understanding is the ultimate, perfect, will-never-change-in-the-future science. (It's their religion.) Even a casual examination of the history of science disproves that particular conceit. There are 26 fundamental constants that physical science simply cannot explain: they just are what they are.  In the larger scheme of things, modern science and technology are light years ahead of the science of the 17th Century. However, if you look at things like the anthropic principle (see earlier blog of that title), the fundamental constants, climate change, Dark Energy, earthquake prediction, the nature of the Earth's core... well, it becomes abundantly clear that we are barely in the infancy of science right now.  It's really not a bad place to be - I have something to do.

From where I sit, however, I can see them both converging on the same thing: The Truth.

~~~~~

Popper

...as in Sir Karl Popper (1902 - 1994).  He was an Austrian philosopher of science who rejected the traditional idea that science advances by observation, deduction, and proof. Instead, Popper held that knowledge advances through a creative process of developing theories which are filtered out by Falsifiability: they were assumed to be correct until proven wrong. In the 1930's the logical positivists treated him as a kindred spirit. They held that a statement was true only if it was verifiable (a sort of reverse way of saying the same thing). The weakness of this approach is that Popper felt that knowledge advancement was an evolutionary process.

Well... sort of.

What he meant was that the theories that survive are the ones that best help us survive and prosper. When a theory is tested, we consider how it fits with our overall belief system and reject the theory that is most expendable - the one with the least inductive evidence supporting it. Sort of like cross-pollinating and irradiating your roses to evolve the Black Rose that your aesthetic has desired. This is like adhering to a religion that's convenient.

That's not really how real science works. Falsifiability is crucial, yes. However, convenience - to convolve a theory to optimize our existing belief system - no. That's not seeking Truth.  It's taking the road most traveled.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) argued forcefully that science advances only through a process of observing anomalies that don't fit with existing theories... these inevitably lead through a "paradigm shift" to a newer theory. Quine and Duhem (1861-1916) also retrospectively laid out a weakness of Popper's approach - they were certain that hypotheses can never be falsifiable in isolation. Any scientific theory is really an interdependent set of theories and assumptions, where any anomalous observation can falsify a number of different hypotheses. Falsifiability proceeding this way is closer to how modern science works.

There are also hypotheses that can never be falsifiable by definition: the existence of God, the existence of a Multiverse, etc.

For this reason, String Theory isn't science, but instead could be better described as mathematical philosophy.  Perfecting a Black Rose - creating something beautiful and intellectually satisfying. While the theory strives to match observed physics, it isn't testable.  For some, it's become a new religion (see an earlier blog entry about Atheists Believe).

This is the sort of thing that gives philosophy a bad name in the first place: it's just another example of the un-testable how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin sort of stuff that preoccupied religious thinkers before the Enlightenment... before the idea that you could - and should - actually test things to prove them.

~~~~~
  

Blue Ridge

As I write this I am looking westward towards Virginia's Blue Ridge.  I've been participating all day in meetings in the USGS National Center, to discuss with several corporations how we can use a technology I developed to map and identify rare earth elements hidden beneath the Atlantic Continental Shelf.  I've retreated to my hotel room to get some space to myself - something I have in common with a majority of the human population who are not hard extroverts.

It's called Blue Ridge because... it's blue.  It's edges and colors are lost in the permanent haze on this side of the country, caused by the prevailing winds blowing eastward all the pollutants of the continent.

This is a sort of metaphor for our memories.  I recall some things vividly (close calls with death tend to stand out), but most other things are lost in a blue haze like my westward vista.  This is not abnormal, it's not bad - it's part of the human experience.  The digerati among us know that to record the video and audio details of 16 waking hours of our life would require something larger than the hard disk on our desktop computer... and that's not even hi-res.  If we had perfect recall we wouldn't be able to hear ourselves think for the racket of all the details crowding into the forefront of our minds.  This is not a fault of the human mind, it's a defense.

Any good scientist will demonstrate certain habits.  They take careful notes of their experimental results. After a few cases of a lost sheet of crucial numbers here or there, scientists become compulsively well organized as well: they record things in a bound notebook, or if they are really OCD like me they keep detailed notes in a digital file... with backup copies all over the place in at least three different formats.

THIS way, we can always recover the crucial information - the memories that have gone hazy and blue - when necessary - when we want and need them.

I once put together a list of things that I labeled THOTL, which was short for The Hand of the Lord.  This list was the 13 different critical nodes on the Gantt Chart I used to plot our family's move to Venezuela for a three year assignment. Failure to pass through any single one of these nodes on a precise schedule - passing the State Department health screening, for instance - would have left us in the United States with mono-lingual children. I never would have had those hundreds of astounding jungle experiences, we would never have had all our life-long Venezuelan friends. There is a huge list of positives for all seven of us that came from this experience.

However, if I had not put together that list - kept detailed notes - all the critical step-by-step getting-there information would have been lost in the blue haze of time. I would have easily forgotten that 13 separate nodes were all passed successfully - a statistical improbability. Flip a coin 13 times and do you think they will all come up heads? If you're interested, there is just a 1 in 8,192 chance that this could have happened without outside intervention.  And that's not counting the precise timing aspect.

My life is full of these things: success after improbable success. A recently example: a huge survey off the coast of South Africa using my marine induced polarization patents. The survey defied the odds: not a single failure of any one of ~30 different components. We successfully mapped a 45 km x 15 km chunk of the sub-seafloor off the coast of South Africa, and laid out in three dimensions where the placer heavy minerals could be found.

You can invoke incredible luck - or accept outside intervention.

There is a crucial take-away here, too: if I had not recorded these events, the blue haze of human memory would have lost them - like tears in rain - and with time I would not have remembered or recognized the repeated Divine Intervention that defies all probability. Don't get me wrong: I am tested with difficult things like anyone else, maybe more so to keep me humble. If I dwelled on these - instead of the intervention miracles - I would be the Biggest Loser.

KEEP A JOURNAL.

Don't throw away the incredible gift of recognizing Divine Intervention and the love that it implies so strongly.  If you record these, you WILL see that Finger through the veil.

~~~~~

Line Upon Line

A musical genius named Lex de Azevedo wrote a song, part of "Saturdays' Warrior", with that title.  I cannot sing it to myself (I've memorized it) without tearing up at the astounding promise it unfolds.

As noted earlier ("ESTJ") I am a very linear person - I get uncomfortable if I can't see where I'm going.  I want the answers to everything now.  Patience is for the testosterone-challenged...

The first time I stepped beyond my linear comfort zone was to accept that being 85% convinced that the LDS Church was the Sendero Luminoso - the Shining Path was enough (I refuse to let the Peruvian Maoists usurp that name).  I took the Leap of Faith and became a Mormon.

I started getting help and guidance then... if you've read this far then you already know were that came from.  My life veered from its usual oscillatory character into an upward trajectory of consistent happiness and growing knowledge.  However, Mr. Linear wanted ALL the answers and wanted them ASAP.  To that end I took all the Institute classes offered at the University of Arizona - 10 semester classes - in two years, finally co-teaching one of them (on Science and Religion).

There were still things in the Bible and the Book of Mormon that I didn't understand, and likewise with the much-denser-content Pearl of Great Price... but with time I was able to walk and drive about 60% of the Lehite Trail, and everything checked to the tilde (see the oddly-named chapter on the Frankincense Trail, "How to deal with a corpse in 35 C weather").  I served as chief scientist for volcano hazards for the US Geological Survey, and 3 Ne 8 correlated precisely with a ~VEI 6 to 7 level volcano-tectonic subduction zone event.  The volcanic history of Central America, of course, wasn't available to anyone in 1828 (see "Volcanoes you could never know about").

With time I actually matured a bit (to the surprise of many).  I took the Federal Executive Institute management-bootcamp-on-steroids training and learned how to moderate my heat-seeking missile personality... over time I began to appreciate how wonderful it is to steadily gain new knowledge.  As a scientist I learn new things about geology, hydrology, biology, volcanology, cosmology, quantum mechanics, etc., every week, sometimes every day.  As an LDS Scientist, however, the growth is even richer, verging on the knee-shaking astounding.  The real character of the Urim & Thummin, the vast, multi-generational power and ultimate significance of the Family, a steadily-broadening understanding of the Atonement... have all been added unto me.  I also have help with my own research - I don't waste time following dead ends, because I have guidance that helps me avoid them.  That's astounding all by itself, even after I've become used to it.

The best news of all, however, is that the progression isn't slacking off: it's picking up speed.  Like the Dark Energy effect on the galaxies, my knowledge-universe expansion is actually accelerating with time.

Line upon line, precept on precept

That is how He lifts us

That is how He teaches his children

Line upon line, precept on precept

Like a summer shower

Giving us each hour His wisdom

If we are patient, we shall see
How the pieces fit together in harmony.

Then we'll know who we are in this Big Universe...

~~~~~

You need to go find that last part yourself.

~~~~~

Aggressive Driving, Poison Pen

There is a certain degree of anonymity that comes with posting things online - comments, email, chat, whatever.  There is also a certain degree of anonymity when we are alone at the wheel of a car.  Or at least it may seem so.

In both cases there can be a personality change.  In neither case should there be.

It's become something of a cultural icon: the Soccer Mom.  Too many obligations, high stress, and time constraints can change our personality for the worse.  We can all sometimes allow ourselves to get wound too tight.  I've had to pull part-way off the road to avoid a head-on collision because someone was absolutely determined to pass me in a dangerous stretch - just to get to the next light and start again at the same time as me.  She really didn't gain 9 more seconds on her schedule.  I've found myself fuming that the person in front of me was driving 5 miles below the speed limit.  My wife had a road encounter with a young Mormon bishop and described her contempt at his aggressive driving - and what that said about him.  Whoa.

The same holds true for writing.  I once met a senior geophysicist in Boulder, Colorado.  He was a very polite, almost obsequious individual.  I subsequently dealt with him professionally over reviews of some manuscripts, and that is where I learned the meaning of "poison pen" - it was a very different, aggressive personality: a Mr. Hyde personality exposed.  Years after I moved away from Denver and this individual had apparently retired, I received what my wife calls a "nasty gram": He accused me of sabotaging an NSF proposal he had sent in.  It had been several years since I had reviewed an NSF proposal, of course.  In the same nasty letter he included two sheets from his professional bibliography - his way of bragging apparently.  I immediately noticed that there were multiple papers - apparently the same thing but with slightly changed titles - submitted to different scientific journals.  Each paper had a number: 746, 747, 748, etc. It was a startlingly overt case of what in science professions is called "padding your bibliography."  It's a form of professional cheating, and anyone who spends any time reviewing such a thing (for instance, while serving on a peer-review panel... or reviewing an NSF proposal) will recognize this quickly and downgrade the bibliography and the worth of the individual accordingly.  I couldn't imagine a more jarring letter: an unfounded accusation and bragging combined with transparent dishonesty.  I learned later that his goal was to reach 1,000 publications before he died.

What a miserable excuse for immortality.  How incredibly sad.

My dissertation director and friend Ken Zonge once told me that in his experience dishonesty will always come back to bite you: in 10 seconds or in 10 years, perhaps - but it will come back at you.  This was in response to my reflective comment that I was glad to have him as an adviser because he was both honest and considerate.  He made it clear that he was this way for his own personal peace of mind.  

Stephen R. Covey observed that trust in someone takes a long time to build - but can be lost almost instantly by an ethical or moral violation.  He describes this pattern as a saw-blade: a long ramp up, a sharp drop, followed by a much longer ramp up to rebuild trust again.  Once burned, twice wary.  This crops up over and over again with politicians in the news.  It seems like a significant percentage of the human population is unable to think clearly in certain areas.  Gonads for brains, a roommate once said.

The take-away here:

Your private life must stand up to public scrutiny.  There is no such thing as anonymity - even hackers who use Anonimizer get nailed (three hackers in southern Spain were jailed on 10 June, 2011).  Misbehaving when you think no one is watching - or with other misbehavers and assume that it won't leak out - is a fool's errand.  Everything, always, will come back to haunt you.

If you always behave in private like everything will become public at some point... you'll never have to worry.

How do you spell tranquility?  Live so you never have to say you're sorry.

~~~~~