Adventure

For Bilbo Baggins, an Adventure made life worth living. For the rest of his long life he itched for another.

For many human beings, adventure is often just being able to claim you were that first at something: the first on a new pitch at Smith Rocks, Oregon, the first to summit K2 in Nepal, the first to free-climb Half Dome in Yosemite...

There are several books at home that I cherish, including

• "Undaunted Courage" - the Lewis and Clark expedition,
• "Sailing Alone Around the World" - Joshua Slocum's first one-man circumnavigation of the Earth,
• "Tigrero" - Alexander Siemel's hunt for man-eating Jaguars in Brazil's Matto Grosso,
• "Endurance" - Earnest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition, and Worsely's incredible open-boat navigation across 800 miles of the terrible Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island.

There are others, but these are the ones I re-read every couple of years.

I have pondered a definition of "Adventure."  In my opinion it means going off to someplace where few if any have gone before.  It does NOT mean a day-trip, or going somewhere that a cell-phone can call for help from. Importantly, it means going someplace where you are on your own.  If something goes bad, it's up to you and your expedition members to work out your own survival. Fail, and there is no record of the fact that you perished - or like the Franklin Expedition seeking the Northwest Passage, archeologists reconstruct your grim demise a century later. 

According to this definition, I and many of our family members have had some adventures:

1. My first, 10-day sojourn in the deep Amazonas forest of eastern Venezuela. It was full of amazing wonders, including falling 50-meter (160-foot) flaming trees and the deadly Cuaima Pina, or Bushmaster snake - but I nearly died of Shigella - from a cook's dirty hands.
2. Jared, Val, and I hiked to - and summited - Mount Roraima ("The Mother of Waters") on the Venezuelan, Guyana, and Brazilian triple-frontier. The trip covered over 50 kilometers on foot, and the last pitch required climbing a crack up a 700-meter (2,000-foot) cliff to an eerie Moonscape at 3,000 meters (9,600 feet) elevation.  We were promptly engulfed in a sleet-storm. 
3. Louise and Lisa made that same trip the following year - Lisa wore flip-flops most of the way.
4. Louise and Val hiked to the great Auyantepuy - the greatest cliff-sided mountain on Earth - and climbed it - and both nearly drowned in Devil's Canyon on the way.
5. My first trip into the roadless Amazonas Territory of southern Venezuela. I was nearly consumed by insects on this trip, but the real sticker was an encounter with a pair of murderous bandits... who counted us at least three times before they decided there were too many of us (about 20) to cleanly kill. Our Venezuelan counterparts also reminded the bandits that we were American diplomats - and there would certainly be follow-up if we didn't return. 
6. The first Summer Crossing of the Empty Quarter (there are only a handful of true crossings on record). This required driving 1,700 kilometers (over 1,000 miles) over continuous sand dunes in the hottest desert on earth - even Bedouin only venture into the fringes, and only in winter. Neither fixed-wing nor rotary aircraft can venture into this desolate place; we had only intermittent HF radio contact with the outside world. We camped one night in northern Yemen during its 1994 Civil War - because the Saudi border map placed one guard-post fully 72 kilometers (45 miles) from where it actually was. I completed a magnetic survey over an asteroid-impact site called Wabar when the temperature reached 61 degrees C (142 degrees F) - and according to my companions, was unconscious for 20-30 minutes from heat-stroke afterwards. The next day we visited a "weather station" that was so radioactive that my Geiger Counter went off-scale at its highest setting when my back was against the outside wall.
7. The first overnight camping expedition inside Mount St Helens volcano, just as the 2004 - 2006 eruption was ending. You have no idea how immense this volcanic edifice is until you find yourself IN it. I did this to help a crew of desperate geophysicists, and unlike them I chose to walk out, and not take the return helicopter. This meant hiking in incredibly-dissected, unconsolidated boulder fields for nearly 20 kilometers with a 30-kg backpack. I lost a toenail and blew out a knee doing it, and no, there was no cell-phone reception. 

I have cherished photos of these trips, and the book Louise and I wrote has 45 photos in it, many from Mount Roraima. The really scary thing about these experiences, however... is that I would go back and do them again in a heartbeat.

I guess it's in my blood.  It's why I accepted the challenge to be the USGS chief scientist for volcano hazards. It's clearly in the family's blood, also. It must be genetic - I'm certain I got it from my wife and kids.

~~~~~

Inventions and Patents

I realize that it's been awhile since my last entry. During that time I have been unusually busy at work. What follows are two short blogs with a long third one - an explanation of how inventions happen and how patents really work - in between.

VOLCANOES AND WATER
I carried out - with the help of five other people, 300 kg of equipment, and a large helicopter - a series of Controlled-Source Audio-Magnetotelluric (CSAMT for obvious reasons) soundings inside and around Mount St Helens. These are geo-electrical soundings that allow me to "see" the conductivity structure beneath the array of equipment down to about 900 meters depth.

We were looking for water. Why? If a volcanic edifice is saturated with water, there is internal pore-pressure pushing outwards, making the volcanic edifice more likely to fall apart with a moderate provocation (a small eruption or earthquake). In April and May 1980, the north face of Mount St Helens volcano bulged northward about 1 meter each day for over a month. But instead of just part of the front (north) face falling off, the largest landslide in recorded human history on 18 May 1980 reached all the way back into the core of the volcano and well beyond, taking out a huge amount of the south side of the volcano with it. To know if Mount Rainier or Mount Hood are truly dangerous - there are huge populations exposed to each - we need to know where the water in them resides.  This is one of the tasks I proposed several years ago to the Volcano Hazards Program as I rotated out of the chief scientist position, and my proposal was accepted. There wasn't much money allocated (we are the USGS, not the Department of Defense, after all), but my salary was funded half-time to work on this problem.

~~~~~

INVENTIONS AND PATENTS
I also prepared for, then traveled to Waikaloa on the Big Island of Hawai'i, to give a talk on my most recent patent application to the Marine Technology Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) annual meeting. They sure picked a nice venue! I was able to show that a subtle physical property discovered in 1912 (and first published by Conrad Schlumberger in 1920) called Induced Polarization ("IP") could be used to:

• detect disseminated sulfides beneath the Earth's surface - such as huge porphyry copper deposits around the world and Black Smoker sulfide deposits on the seafloor,
• detect and characterize other minerals, including certain oxides of titanium and Rare Earth Elements,
• map heavy placer minerals, including these and intimate associations of gold, diamonds, and platinum-group elements beneath the seafloor,
• map and characterize dangerous and toxic urban human effluent ("anthropogenic waste") in sensitive bays, estuaries, and sounds,
• map and characterize disseminated oil plumes in the deep ocean.

IP detects minerals because an inducing voltage causes ions from a surrounding electrolyte (on land this is the groundwater) to adsorb onto the mineral surface. Release that inducing voltage, and the ions will re-equilibrate, that is, "bleed off" the mineral surface, giving rise to a small but measurable signal. Understanding this is relatively easy; making it actually work requires a lot of sophisticated electrical engineering.

The first three bullet items above relate to a pair of patents awarded in 2001 to the Department of Interior. These patents are owned by the Secretary of Interior, but are referred to as "the Wynn patents," after the initiating scientist/inventor. The final item on the list above was the subject of my thoughts when I first heard of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. By August 2010, the Macondo Well blowout had poured over 200,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf. "How can I help my country at this time of need," I asked myself? My thinking went along these lines: 

• the IP effect behaves like a capacitance; 
• a classic capacitor consists of two conductive metal plates separated by a dielectric material, usually in the form of oil; 
• oil droplets immersed in highly-conductive seawater were topologically equivalent 
• --> therefore IP should be able to detect that oil.

What followed was yet another education for me: my "technicalese" explanation and diagrams were sent from the USGS Technology Enterprise Office in Reston, VA, to a patent attorney who works for the US Army Redstone Missile Defense office in Birmingham, Alabama. Beginning seven months later, she began to correspond with me about it, using a ".mil" email address. Joan (the attorney) then converted my 21st Century language into an odd, late-18th-Century English ("...a perfect embodiment of which is...") to be acceptable to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). 

Joan also revised my diagrams to remove all text, and added tiny lines attached to numbers for each thing I had explained in the application - and quite a few more that I thought were obvious (my drawing of a boat sure looks like a boat). A good patent attorney usually has, in addition to a law degree, the equivalent of an additional engineering degree.

Joan also patiently explained to me how claims work. Claims are the bulleted elements at the end of a patent description that are usually longer than the patent description itself. This invention claims to do this and that... but if the claim is too general, then competitors can rightly claim that it's simply a tactic to stifle development in a broad range of technology. Apple, for instance, patented "touch screen technology", but ultimately this was thrown out by the courts as being too broad, stifling legitimate creative innovation. If the claims are too specific, on the other hand, then a competitor can make a slight tweak to the invention - a different electrode or cable-type for instance - and then claim that it's something different. This will then by-pass the patent as if it didn't exist. Obtaining a patent in the U.S. does NOT guarantee protection against intellectual thieves in China or India or Japan.

That's why patent attorneys, at lease, exist.

As the patent was submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Joan warned me: this application now has a provisional number, but it will likely not even be looked at by a patent examiner for at least two years. Such is the huge and growing backlog in the USPTO as new patent applications double and triple each year. It is "just another government agency" that sees no increase in funding year to year, and like others is being asked to do more with less.  

In the meantime, I had initiated a CRADA - a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement - with an ocean engineering firm in Seattle and a geophysical instrumentation firm in Tucson. The agreement is carefully vetted by ethics officers and government lawyers to ensure that everything is done above-board and correctly. The agreement said I would provide technical advice, and my CRADA partners would commercialize the technology I invented. 

Interesting note: they also pay license fees into the US Treasury! They also conduct laboratory measurements under my direction (the USGS can no longer afford to do much laboratory work), and build cables to tow behind ships to prove the technology. Together these two companies carried out the largest IP survey in human history off the coast of South Africa. This survey discovered a huge, previously unknown titanium-sand resource in two immense pockets beneath the seafloor. Everyone was happy about that success.

The CRADA partners also agreed to fund my travel to Waikaloa to represent them and our joint work - so this travel to a paradise world was not done at Taxpayers' expense. By giving the presentation, I was representing the USGS, Williams & Associates, and Zonge International to the rest of the marine technology world. Over 800 people heard me speak about the technology, including my boss' boss' boss' boss: the USGS Director, Dr. Marcia McNutt.  She later sent me an email thanking me for representing the USGS with a major technology breakthrough - she added that "it warmed my heart." 

~~~~~

...AND PLUMBING. SIGH.

It seems to be the order of things that the day after I completed the final important element of a series of complicated tasks, I allowed myself to stop and deal with a worsening plumbing problem in our house. At 7:30pm Tuesday, while tired and helping a friend and professional plumber solve a strange blockage in the hot water line of the shower, I stepped out of the bathtub, and ran my bare foot into a length of perfectly-wedged copper tubing leaning against the tub. Because of the way tubing is cut, beveled outside-in, it forms a perfect circular knife. I filetted a chuck the size of my thumb off the sole of my foot in such a way as to expose the most vascular structure possible. Translation: it bled all over me, the carpet, and the tub, and even my utterly calm and efficient wife ("GET your head down on the floor... RAISE your foot HIGH over the edge of the bathrub... HOLD this surgical wrap for me while I open this sterile gauze...") couldn't stop the bleeding. A Kaiser emergency room physician more or less could, but it required four painful injections (not counting the tetanus shot) and 10 stitches. 

At least now there was nothing critically necessary to do, so I took my first sick-leave in 25 years and sat around the house updating websites for two days. I learned a lot this past month... including how capable and loving my wife is.

~~~~~

We're the Dark Matter...

“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” –  a U.S. Navy SEAL, describing the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known as JSOC.

This is a quote from the Washington Post, Friday September 2 edition. The article refers to a book

"‘Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command", which describes the activities of a secret arm of the American government that increased in size 10-fold following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC.  This secret group is 10 times larger than the CIA, and has extraordinary power and authority directly from the Office of the President. It has its own aircraft, its own intelligence resources, and even its own satellites. 

The JSOC also has its own Cyberwarriors, who, on Sept. 11, 2008, shut down every jihadist Web site that existed at the time.  

Only one or two commanders have ever been in the Public's eye - mainly General Stanley McCrystal, whose operational HQ in Balad Airfield northwest of Baghdad had a sign on it: "17  5  2"  This cryptic note stood for working 17 hours a day for work, 5 hours for sleep, and two hours for eating and exercising. 

Obscurity has been a key hallmark of this unusual unit. When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or US embassies abroad, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their brother military attaches. In combat they wear no name or rank identifiers. 

When 9/11 took place, the expression "asymmetric warfare" mainly circulated among the military colleges and military strategy writers: if you can't confront a large and well-funded army, then try guerrilla warfare - something unexpected, using far less resources. 9/11 was one of the best examples of asymmetric warfare in the history of man: 19 men and a half a million dollars brought about the deaths of over 3,000 Americans - and caused over $1 Trillion in damages and collateral expense.

The JSOC was America's way of taking back the asymmetric advantage. These are the guys who found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the psychopathic al-Qaeda leader of Iraq, in 2006. These are the guys who surgically took out Osama bin Laden in May, 2011. The book describes a host of additional successes - and some failures, such as the obliteration of most of an Afghani wedding party that had been celebrating during the night by firing guns into the air... when a Spectre gunship was orbiting above.  

Because of its deliberate obscurity and lack of ego, many more successes are either poorly understood or not documented at all in the public media.  An Air Force CIO once said "You can accomplish truly amazing things if you don't care who gets credit for them," and the JSOC seems to have understood this from the get-go.

~~~~~

Most Americans were shocked by 9/11 - they couldn't understand how anyone could bear such animosity towards their country. We are the ones always helping others, after all - including saving the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from butchery by "christians" (little "c"). 

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, I was aware of the terrible, cumulative resentment held by virtually all Arabs: (a) that Israel had robbed the Palestinians of lands held for 20 generations or more with western European aid, and (b) that the continued land-grabs and apartheid in Israel/Palestine were supported unquestioningly with bottomless resources and assistance by the United States.  I was aware that virtually all Arabs can recall the gruesome details of the Crusades. My staff could recite to me in detail the terrible horrors inflicted in the name of Christ starting 900 years ago... a history virtually unknown to people living in the United States. Having had hundreds of conversations with Arab people, both Christian and Muslim, I knew that there was a deep well of resentment there. 

An integral part of al-Qaeda's message was to be as public as possible, so as to draw more recruits - and to make a case for Osama bin Laden to become a new, 20th Century Caliph.

However, killing innocent civilians is forbidden by both the Bible and the Qu'ran - under any circumstances. This requires some convoluted logic by Salafist "scholars" - the people who wrote the religious justifications for killing so many people, most of whom ultimately were Muslims. To this end, al-Qaeda deliberately recruited soldiers who were largely illiterate, with just enough education to fly (if not land) an aircraft.

Don't kill innocents. Tell that to the uneducated Crusaders who looted and butchered whole populations as they marched from the Danube to Jerusalem. Tell that to the christian Falange militia that butchered every living being in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. Tell that to the indoctrinated hijackers who flew aircraft into buildings on September 11, 2001.  

When I became a Mormon, it surprised my Jewish roommate at Berkeley. I suggested he give it some thought himself, and was surprised by his reply: "Do you have any idea how many of my ancestors were killed in the name of Christ?!??"

The world will always have its self-anointed and self-righteous murderers.  For me, well, I understand both sides' feelings of outrage and helplessness. But ultimately I'm an American, and want my children to grow up without fear of murder by fanatics, whether christian or moslem.  

I therefore take great pride, both as an American and as an admirer of anonymous personal sacrifice for the greater good, in the existence of the JSOC. Who would you rather have on your side?

~~~~~

Godan

Godan is the Japanese word for 5th Dan - that is, 5th degree blackbelt. I earned mine this past weekend during a three-day "Summer Camp" for Jujitsu blackbelts in Los Angeles. 

Ever wonder what black belts study during annual re-tread training?

Here's the list of seminars, spread out over three days in Santa Clarita:

1. Flashlight techniques - Because police and prison guards use a flashlight as both a tool and a self-defense weapon. Used correctly, it beats the heck out of a knife as a weapon in a confrontation.

2. Ki for the Western Mind - what IS The Force, really?

3. Reviewing Big Book Techniques Part III - There are some 830 different Jujitsu Kata (discrete techniques) listed in the notes of George Kirby, the 10th Dan head of Budoshin Jujitsu.  We worked through about 10 of these in two hours, repairing things like "...place left foot under the attacker's throat..." where it should be "right foot" in the written descriptions.

4. The Science of Throwing, Part I - Why do some Judo throws magically work while others appear clumsy and ineffectual?  Hint: the key (Ki) is the axis of where the feet are pointing.

5. What to Do When Things Head South (I taught this session) - When does Jujitsu change from a defensive martial art to a survival martial art? An interesting statistic: 75% or more of 4-on-1 fights end up in death or permanent injury... usually from the head-stomping at the end. The Giants fan attacked in Dodger Stadium a few months ago is a case in point. Knowing that statistic, how would you adjust your handling of a developing assault? One of my sons (Cory) is alive today because in a dicey evening situation in Blacksburg, VA, he happened to be carrying his ASP baton... that was a 6-on-1 attack, and the six were Rugby players who had been experimenting with massive doses of steroids.

6. Momentum and its Application in Jujitsu - This is the Art (Jutsu), after all... so dealing with a frontal attack should involve the smallest use of muscle power possible. Linear attack? Circular response, and vice versa.

7. Reviewing Big Book Techniques Part IV - Know six different ways to take down someone grabbing your lapel (or chest hair)? Here are two more. So you've dropped your attacker on the ground? How do you keep him there (three more)?

8. The Science of Throwing Part II - The throw still isn't working right? The attacker is resisting your efforts to flatten him? Several things you can do to physically (and mentally) unbalance him.

9. Black Belt Testing - A young guy earns his first black belt during an hour of ferocious testing. Two old guys add a stripe each to their belts. It takes typically 3 - 5 years of continuous study and practice to earn the Shodan (1st Degree blackbelt). It takes a minimum of 4 years to go from Yodan (4th Dan) to Godan (5th Dan). These are really earned.

10. Reaction Time Drills - How do you teach your students to deal with the unexpected? These clever (and increasingly dangerous) drills will give them confidence. For the Senseis taking this training: how do you make sure that no one is injured in what is easily the most dangerous non-weapon martial art?

The good news: I made it from Santa Clarita to pass TSA security at the Burbank airport in 50 minutes.

The best news: I returned home with no significant injuries.

~~~~~

Gragga

That was the name by which my mother and uncle called their maternal grandmother. Her real name was Mamie Ross, and she married Frank Charles Smith. Sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, they were living with their two toddlers in Kernville, CA, where Frank had found work in a mine. As my mother tells the story, Frank came home one night and, quite drunk, said "Mamie, we have to move out of the house. I gambled it away tonight."

Mamie (Gragga to most everyone) said to him what at that time was a pretty bad word: "Frank, you are an old piss-ant."

With that she grabbed the two toddlers, what clothing she could, and dragged them all the way down to the Kern River. With rope she tied the two children so they wouldn't wander into the river (which to this day drowns up to 7 people a year). She returned to the now-forsaken house and dragged everything she thought she would need: pots and pans, blankets, etc. With that crucial step completed, she built a lean-to for shelter, all before the Sun rose in the east.

For the next several months, Mamie would feed the children in the morning, tie them with ropes to a tree, and walk into Kernville. There she would load her arms with the dirty clothes of the miners and return to the river, where she would wash them in the shallows with stones and sand, and lay them out to dry on rocks. With her meager earnings from this labor, she carefully saved up a nickle at a time and kept it in an old coffee-can buried in the dirt floor of the lean-to. Such was life for my great-grandmother at the turn of the 20th Century.

One day a mine owner approached her and said that he had noticed her industrious character, and had a deal for her: if she would cook and run a boarding house for miners that he had just built, she could have free room and board and a small profit after that. She agreed.

Several months later a delegation of the righteous ladies of Kernville approached the boarding house on a Sunday morning and knocked at the door. Mamie answered. The leading lady told her that they had decided, as upright ladies of the town, that the circumstances of Mamie's two children were unacceptable: that their mother was unmarried and living in a boarding house with miners - an unacceptably immoral life. They were there to take the two toddlers and raise them in a God-fearing manner.

"Is that so," said Mamie? "Just a moment, I'll be right back."

She returned with the largest meat-cleaver in her kitchen and said, "The last one of you ladies to get out of this yard will have the back of her bodice chopped open."

She reported years later, with some amusement, that you would never believe that women in full hoop skirts could clear a picket fence so fast.

Long after that Mamie married a man I vaguely remember as "Uncle Joe." Frank Smith by this time was a cowboy working on the huge Walker Ranch east of Kernville. He came down with cancer, and Mamie and Joe took him into their home in Bakersfield and cared for him until he died. That says even more about her than the experience surviving beside the Kern River.

In my genealogy I count Conan Prince of Wales, Humphrey de Bohun who signed the Magna Carta, and Charlemagne, among others.

I'm proudest, however, of Gragga, and have made sure that all my kids know her story.

~~~~~

Evolving Paradigms

500 years ago, everyone thought the world was flat. One could go outside, and look at the sea or a wind-swept plain and say "of course - it looks flat, it must BE flat." A Greek scientist traveling to southern Egypt almost 1,800 years earlier had shown that the Sun was at a different angle at noon there than at Athens on the same day. He was convinced that this fact proved that the Earth was round, but the idea didn't take off, to use modern language. When Magellan's lone caraval finally made it back to Lisbon after circumnavigating the Earth east-to-west, the ship's log was inexplicably one day behind Lisbon. Everyone was certain that they had made multiple entries every day in the correct order. Hmmm.

I once flew in a Concorde from London to Dulles airport in Virginia, and from 20 miles up I can tell you that the sky is dead black at mid-day, and the horizon is noticeably curved. I BELIEVE!

That is called a paradigm-shift: everyone's idea of reality changes. Usually it means that the new explanation, or paradigm, better explains what we can observe. (But not always.)

People during the Medieval period also thought the Earth was the center of everything; the Sun and Moon rotated around it, and Man was the most important thing on the Earth. Sure looked like Earth was the center. There was a problem explaining the jinking paths of the planets, however, until Kepler and others made the convincing argument that those paths could be explained rather nicely if you just gave up the Earth-centered paradigm. Kepler and Galileo had Hell to pay as they got cross-wise with the Catholic church over this, however.

Another sloooooowwwww paradigm-shift.

In the early 20th Century, Einstein proposed first his Special Theory of Relativity, and later his General Theory of Relativity. He did this by means of a gedanken experiment - a thinking experiment. It took a long time for physicists to accept that time could slow, that light could bend in empty space, and that no frame was anchored: there was no point in the universe that you could call "fixed": or the "center" - everything was relative and just the speed of light was left fixed. Well, at least you could count on something being countable-on. When things get tough to comprehend, physicists tend to "revert" to mathematical formalisms. I can explain relativity much easier with just a few equations... much easier than trying to explain how my evil twin Jason ended up being younger than me.


This paradigm-shift in peoples' minds was quite a bit more rapid than previous shifts. Again, humankind had a new, improved version of "reality," which I'm now going to start putting in quotes.

Note to self: during a solar eclipse, light from a distant star was shown to bend. That even made the front page of the New York Times. Also, precise clocks on GPS satellites have to be carefully adjusted for the "frame drag" of relativity because of their velocity relative to the hand-held GPS device I am using to find out where I left the danged car.

In the 1920's the idea of Quantum Mechanics arose to explain "non-classical" behavior of elementary particles and light. "Non Classical" means you can't easily wrap your head around the concepts that arose: particles had characteristics of waves and vice-versa, and Heisenberg said you couldn't pin down BOTH location and momentum of a particle at the same time. An electron was not a charged particle, but instead it was actually a probability cloud wrapped around a proton - to make a hydrogen atom.


After 1945, everyone started idolizing physicists - these guys could make that mumbo-jumbo actually DO something (kill ~220,000 human beings with two bombs). Most people could easily wrap their heads around killing a lot of people and ending a protracted war. I guess we can believe the physicists from now on, eh?

But don't be in too much of a hurry here. Einstein really, really, really didn't like quantum mechanics. Sure, he could understand the math of Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Fermi and others, but it just didn't... feel right to him. Einstein resisted quantum mechanics til the day he died.

Some paradigm-shifting here, but more for some, less for others.

~~~~~

Let's Quick Jump to the 21st Century: the paradigm-shifts are coming fast and furious the last 40 years:
- Black Holes exist.
- Continents Drift is happening - and causes volcanoes!
- Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) describes hadrons (including protons and neutrons) and how they behave and interact.
- Cigarettes are not good for your after-dinner digestion, but instead destroy your lungs and kill your heart and prove that you are stupid.
- Fuzzy Black Holes. Monster, Galaxy-Scale Black Holes. Black Holes that can decrease and go away over trillions of years.
- Cancer is really caused by a few stem-cells inside a tumor, not most of the cells we call "cancer."
- Complementarity - the idea that you can describe what's inside the Black Hole's Event Horizon (where you can't see anything because nothing, including light, can escape it) or you can describe the Event Horizon itself... but not both. Because they are the same thing. Got that?

Physicists are moving away from proving things with tests and experiments and back to promoting ideas like 17th Century philosophers, none of which we can ever know to be true because they can't be tested.

So, what IS "reality"? On the face of it, something we understand by organic chemistry and electrical signals in nerves and axons between our retinas, our fingers, our nose, and our brains. I'm talking about the whole inseparable nerve-brain ensemble here. Some physicists are swinging back to that old philosophical concept that we can never really know what "reality" is because of the primitive organic means we have of touching, tasting, and feeling it.

The take-away here:
First, treat anything that physicists tell you to be the truth with a 200 mg dose of healthy suspicion... because what any physicist hangs his hat on will be thrown out for a new paradigm just as sure as you and I breathe. For starts, don't take the Multiple universes ("Multiverse") idea seriously. Same holds for the fundamentally un-falsiable String Theory.

Second, don't take any ridicule for being a believer seriously. I mean come on! WHO'S doing the believing here?!??

~~~~~

The Color of the Door

I've just been reading an issue of Scientific American, paying closest attention to those things I find most interesting: an article about how 10,000 years ago humans began to domesticate plants - and thus it became possible to live longer. The down-range consequence? GRANDPARENTS, with all the cultural survival memories - and increased survival for the grandchildren - that this entails.

Families again.

Another article discusses the Multiverse concept: that we live in just one of an infinite number of universes, and this one just happens to have the physical constants all perfectly aligned to support life. Given enough time - and enough food - mankind can come up with a lot of great ideas. Art. Science. Ways to waste time playing games or blogging. In another earlier blog, I pointed out that concepts like a Multiverse - or for that matter String Theory - are absolutely unprovable. This particular cosmology article (August 2011 issue of Scientific American) took the time to actually point out why they are unprovable: they are concepts, ideas - not theories. They start and end with circular logic. A scientific theory is a fully-developed and self-consistent concept that is also consistent with observed physical facts. It already works. It goes beyond a theory when, like evolution, it can be shown to predict into the future, or explain things that someone hasn't yet reported. The Theory of Evolution isn't really a theory anymore - it's just Evolution. It has been repeatedly tested at widely different scales of size and time, and found to be consistent with observed facts. I've actually personally watched evolution in Venezuelan rats, and in mice left by a Spanish ship anchored in southeast Alaska over 400 years ago. Interestingly, in Wikipedia you can find just Evolution, not the "theory of Evolution."

Evolution doesn't threaten my faith, it augments it. Like Harry Reid said, "I'm a Democrat because I'm a Mormon."

So why worry about these sorts of things? Our ancestors millennia ago didn't have the luxury to do so - they were too busy farming or hunting down the next meal. WE have the luxury of thinking about these things (and getting some minor, temporary fame by writing articles in Scientific American) because we have plenty of food and comfortable housing. Unfortunately, a majority of our brothers and sisters in the United States (and a supermajority beyond its frontiers) don't have that luxury. They struggle to pay their mortgages and put food on the table for their children.

And to what end do they struggle so?

Well, perhaps they love their children and don't want to feed them stones.

And for the thinkers out here who have the luxury of eating toast and a Klondike as they read SciAm and type out the words of their blog? To what end do they do this?

Well, perhaps they want to think that they are more important than a temporary blip on a cosmic wave-function. They don't want to admit their mortality: to admit that they will die and be slowly forgotten with time.

That they aren't important. Not even a little bit.

You're probably wondering: the color of what door? That's a metaphor that I started using in my own mind years ago. A dear friend died when I was 26 and he was 30. Another friend I met and grew to know at the Cascades Volcano Observatory was a photographer on the side, and his life work had quite a number of doors from all over the world. Each door seemed to be a different color, have its own unique character.

Like each of us.

Buck Birdeau died of raging diabetes that first blinded him and then destroyed his kidneys. Dave Wieprecht survived a horrific experience in Vietnam - but not the exposure to Agent Orange - and died of the most virulent of the four known versions of thyroid cancer out there. Both ended their lives as what I would call great people - they had reconciled themselves with who they were in this great universe. They had gotten to the point in life when the most important thing they did was what they did for other people.

THAT's What is important.  NOT the brand of my dress or the existence of a Multiverse.

So. What will be the color of MY door? Lung cancer? It took my Dad and his Mom, but I've avoided tobacco like the plague since I was 20. Stroke? It took my Mom and apparently her Dad, but I've exercised and eaten carefully since I was in my 30's.

One thing for sure: my door will have a color. As Jim Morrison (the wasted minstrel of my generation) once said, "No One gets out of here alive."

He also said "People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend."


I'm just interested in what the color of MY door will be, and will I have time to leave messages of love - and admonition - for the kids and grandkids I love so much... and who must follow? 


I look forward to stepping through that door and going home finally.

~~~~~