Harmonice Mundi

We are Moving!

2009-11-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Followers, Friends, and Casual Browsers,

on behalf of my fellow members of Harmonice Mundi, I am glad to let you know that we will soon be hosted as a main science blog from National Public Radio (NPR). The group will remain the same, with the addition of science journalist and well-known science writer K. C. Cole and biologist and writer Stuart Kauffman.

We expect to start posting in about three weeks, or soon before the Global Warming meeting in Copenhagen.

If you'd like to take a look at the current NPR blogs, here is the link: www.npr.org/blogs

The combination of blogging and (inter)national radio access will give us an unprecedented way of disseminating science to the general public, instigating the debate of current and not-so-current science-related issues.

Please stay tuned! We will come back here to post the proper address, but we should be up and running by December 5th or so.

See you all very soon!

Fear of Science

2009-11-05T07:02:00.001-08:00

Mary Shelley may have been the first to make it explicit in the world of novelistic fiction: science is scary, and the more it advances the scarier it can become. It has something to do with what Bertrand Russell once said, that the power of science comes from its ability to predict the future. After all, to know what will happen tomorrow or the next year has been an age-old dream. We look at stars and planets, at the palms of our hands, at tea leaves, and even develop all sorts of weird rituals to be able to see beyond the fog of time. If science can do it, it beats all that stuff! Tycho Brahe, one of the great astronomers of all time, decided he wanted to become an astronomer once he saw how it was possible to predict, well ahead of time, when an eclipse of the Sun would happen. To have such power, to have human reason pry open the book of Nature and peer into its machinations, was a wondrous thing. And, indeed, this sort of mechanistic approach endured for a very long time, reaching its climax during the Enlightenment, when rationalism was the only way to go: human reason could decipher all there was to decipher, could predict the future and revisit the past, unveil the mysteries of Creation in all detail.

Of course, we now know that there are limits to this set by physics itself: chaos theory tells us that we really can't predict with great accuracy the long-term future of very complex systems, as we can see with weather reports. Quantum mechanics tells us that there are limits to what we can know, to the amount of information we can extract from matter. Both amount to having statistical inferences as the only way to really make a scientifically valid statement. Still, the popular notion persists, as Russell made clear, that science can predict the future and, in that way, that it has taken the place of more mystical practices that try to do the same.

Frankenstein, and the Romantic poets, reacted to this determinism and to the presumed all-powerful science, by restoring doubt, fear, and a moral dimension that should determine the reaches of scientific inquiry. The novel, published in 1817, was a cautionary tale of how far science should or shouldn't go. To be able to do something doesn't mean it should be done. Or does it?

There is no question that, as the Buddha said, "whenever there is light there is shadow." When we invent something new, it can turn both ways. Couldn't nuclear fission have been used only for power and medicine? That's not how it goes. Science has its own momentum. Through their alliances with the State and with industry, scientists don't have complete control of their creations. It's the Faustian bargain that, say, Oppenheimer and the fellow workers in the Manhattan project signed. In a sense, the same bargain is signed every time we get a grant from the government or go to work for a commercial lab. So, the limits of scientific research clash with the fuzzy and often secretive goals of the State and the share holders. When working for defense or for profit, it's hard to slow things down or to control them. Power and greed roll up into an ever-growing snowball.

So what's to be done? At the very least, to raise the level of scientific awareness of the general public. Only a population well-versed in the basic tenets of science and modern scientific research can take control of its own future. There are some very heavy clouds gathering, and complex decisions of where scientific research could or should go will stay at the forefront of the political debate: climate change, energy resources, genetic engineering applied to food, animals and humans. The list is long. To just say "all is well, let's go ahead with all we've got" is to put very powerful guns in the hands of a morally immature species, prone to some very horrible fits of destructive rage. If there can't be a world without evil, let's at least have a world with less evil.

Inventing the Inventors - On the 40th Birthday of the Internet

2009-11-02T04:51:00.001-08:00

I may have been the first person in the history to find out I was going to be Dad via the Internet. It was 1991 and, at the time, I was a graduate student who made periodic trips to study in the Netherlands. On this trip I had given my soon-to-be wife the password to my university computer account and taught her how to use the email program. None of my non-scientist friends knew about email or telnet or ftp or all the other cool things I had learned how to use. So getting my girl on the Internet just seemed like a fun way fun way for us to stay in touch. A few weeks later I got an email that began with the phrase, “You had better sit down…” (My first thought was “I’m reading email, do you think I do this standing up?”)

This memory comes to me as I consider the 40th anniversary the Internet. 40 years ago (this week) the first packet switched computer network was established between a machine in Leonard Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA and Douglas Engelbart’s lab at SRI. Together these two linked computers became the harbingers of everything that would follow from Facebook to iTunes to Web Porn.

Now you don’t need me to wax profound on the profound changes that this invention of inventions has brought to human life. What is worth considering for just a moment however is the speed at which this revolution has been swept through our lives and what it means for a technology to so completely and profoundly alter a society.

So here is a question: Is the Internet the same or different as, say, the telephone or the automobile. In different ways all these innovations show how the advent of a new technology can quickly and profoundly alter culture in ways as diverse as communication modalities to the organization of public spaces. In 1892 just a decade after its invention 240,000 telephones were in use. By 1914 thousands of miles of paved roads had been added to the landscape to handle the car. Even the printing press spread books rapidly through Europe radically changing the ways information was disseminated. So in some ways this has happened before but has what’s going on now added a new dimension?

It is hard to ignore that speed at which information technology has reinvented itself and in the process altered the behavior of entire sub-domains of culture (usually the sub domains of youth as first adopters). There have been those who argue that the use of the internet in relentless searches through the now omnipresent cloud of information changes the way we think, changes our cognitive processes on a fundamental level, So while it would be comforting to think that theses kind of whip-snap changes driven by science and technology have happened before I have the sneaking suspicion that something entirely new in the history of our tool making species is going on. If that is true are there real dangers involved in having a technology move faster than cognitive controls? Even if there are no real dangers we still face the general question of how our inventions are reinventing us.

In other words how do the tools effect changes on the toolmaker?

Infinite Worlds

2009-10-31T05:59:00.000-07:00

Giordano Bruno would have been proud. In 1600, the Italian monk was burned at the stake at Piazza dei Fiori in central Rome for, among some very serious theological offenses (e.g. Mary wasn't a virgin, the Holy Trinity was a scam, etc.), stating that every star in the sky was a sun and that each one of them had its own court of planets. Bruno even put forward the notion that, just like our own planet, these worlds would have living beings and plants. Well, a couple of weeks ago a team at the Southern European Observatory announced the discovery of another 32 extrasolar planets, putting the present count at over 400!

This is exciting science, changing our collective worldview. Yes, many have suspected that there were planets surrounding stars, even in ancient Greece. Why should our solar system be so special? The existence of planets is actually a natural consequence of how we understand stars are born, from the collapse of huge clouds of hydrogen, sprinkled with some (or many, it depends) of the elements of the periodic table. But one thing is to think planets are out here; another is to actually detect them. In science, seeing is believing.

If the Milky Way alone has about 300 billion stars and most of these stars have planets (and some will also have moons), we are talking over a trillion worlds in our own galaxy. A mind boggling number of worlds, each of them different: different chemical composition, may or not have magnetic fields, may or not have an atmosphere, moons, liquid water, frozen water, axial tilt... There is an emerging field of astronomy called "comparative planetology". To learn about many worlds we need to compare them, how they were formed, what's their chemical composition, their distance from their parent star, mass, radius, etc.

Of course, the question in everyone's mind is how common "other earths" are. Are there other worlds with similar characteristics to our own? If so, would life have developed there as it did here? What kind of life would that be? Simple? Complex? We don't know. And, in fact, opinions vary wildly, although we can group them roughly in two camps: the astronomers and the biologists. (Of course, as with any generalization, this one fails. But it's practical.) The astronomers look at the big numbers, the trillions of worlds and claim that, yes, life is out there, and we are just one of an enormous crowd of "typical observers". So, they believe that not just life but intelligent life is all over the place. The biologists are more skeptical. Look at the story of life on Earth, they claim, and you will see that things are more complicated than that. First, for about 2 billions years, life here was pretty simple, unicellular blobs called prokaryotic cells. Only in the last 500 million years or so things got more interesting, and life became multicellular. How can we be sure that complex life will evolve elsewhere? Does evolution necessarily lead to complexity? (And here is a tease for my fellow bloggers in the bio field...) I'd say not. Natural selection has no grand plan toward complex life forms. Whoever fits well into the current environmental conditions will do better. If we are here, it's because of a series of fluke accidents. In this case, we are pretty rare. And precious. Not sure Bruno would have liked this too much.

Why Kepler?

2009-10-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

This blog is a new group effort, a collaboration by a team of scientists and science journalists who want think out loud about a new vision of Science and its role in human culture. Each of us has our own take on what that means and I will let my colleagues explain their own perspective for themselves but today I just wanted to riff on the importance of Johannes Kepler for me in thinking about this project.

We live in an era that is saturated by the fruits and poisons of Science. There can be no doubt have the boons that the scientific world-view has brought to our now global culture (it is what allowed that global culture to form in the first place).

Science has allowed more people to live longer more healthy lives and has increased the material well-being of many. It has been an integral part of ever widening program of freedom of inquiry and intellectual discourse that has helped shaped the modern world as one with a promise (at least) of progressive and egalitarian standards. At the same time, and you don’t need me to tell you this, it has played an integral role in the creation of the very real and very dangerous challenges we face heading deeper into the 21^st century. Every generation tends to think it is on the cutting edge of history but its hard to not believe that those human beings alive today really will be present for a cusp - a change - in the trajectory of the species for better or worse.

So what does this have to do with Kepler? To answer that question, it's best to turn to another eminent scientist a little closer to our era. Wolfgang Pauli was a Noble prize winning scientist who was a key player in the foundations of modern quantum theory. He was a hard-nosed theoretical physicist who was known as the conscience of his field (he is also the originator of the worst insult in science – “not even wrong”). In the 1950s Pauli wrote an essay on Kepler in which he recognized the renaissance science as one who stood between two worlds – worlds which Pauli thought might need to be bridged again.

Throughout his intense mathematical work on the shape of planetary orbits, Keller never stopped thinking in terms of the symbolic. He valued the Copernican Model because the Sun was the rightful “ruler” of the heavens. Platonic forms embodied mathematical harmonies and so the world must be constructed in the likeness. He was a scientist who respected data as the final word in scientific inquiry but was convinced that the world spoke to us in both number and meaning. For Wolfgang Pauli whose vivid dreams often spoke in the language of mathematical physics, Kepler’s instance on the importance of symbolic meanings that rose above specific scientific investigations held a kind promise of recovery. Pauli knew Kepler’s 17^th century worldview could not and should not be recovered (the platonic solids don’t have anything to do with planetary orbits after all). But what mattered for Pauli was the recognition that science - its metaphors, symbols and narratives - carry meaning beyond mere results. They can speak beyond just science practice because the have a broader human context

And that is where we begin.

There are those who say science shows us a Universe without meaning. I say that is a tragically narrow perspective. Science shows us a universe full of meaning because we create it, we imagine it, we respond to the world as it reveals itself to us. In that way we create meanings for the Universe and we do so in the ways that are innate to our species – through metaphor, symbol and narrative.

It is true that science as a discipline needed to mature past the symbolic. The problem came science is only way to express our humanity. The entirety of human culture could not fully leave the realm of meaning behind. It always reappears in our art, our music, our politics and our longing for a sense of what is sacred in our lived experience. The trick now will be to understand how a human culture saturated with Science can find the proper context for the symbolic, for the deeply felt, character of life that also expresses through Science and the cultures broad contact with Science.

Somehow we must integrate our manifold ways of known without losing our way. The trick now is to set science into its proper context.

Adam Frank