Monk

The Higgs boson news was a week or two ago, but I just came across an interesting interview that gets behind the naming of the so-called "God particle".

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And now to a little more about that man, the Higgs behind the Higgs boson - Peter Higgs. As we just heard, Higgs and his team proposed the existence of the so-called "God particle" back in the 1960s. I'm joined now by Victoria Martin, who is a lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. She has studied with Peter Higgs and worked with him at CERN. Welcome to the program.

VICTORIA MARTIN: Thank you very much.

[...]

SIEGEL: I want to ask you about this particle's nickname, the "God particle." What did Higgs, who I've read is an atheist, think about the nickname the "God particle"?

MARTIN: I'm sure - I actually haven't ever asked him this directly, but I'm sure he doesn't like it. Almost all particle physicists detest that name. It was actually Leon Lederman, who's a Nobel laureate, that came up with it. But he was trying to call it "that goddamn particle," and that wasn't allowed by the publishers so it became the "God particle."

-- National Public Radio

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I don't think they're joking.

Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud’s newly anointed practitioners. Psychotherapists occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street.

Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional “caring,” it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship — what we might call “artificial friendship” — for lonely people in a lonely age.

-- Ronald W. Dworkin, "Psychotherapy and the Pursuit of Happiness" in The New Atlantis

If I had the money to pay for 'artificial friendships', I think I would have to go with the high-end escort. Though, if I still had plenty of money to spend, I suppose there might be something to be said for a psychotherapist, someone with whom I can sort out my feelings and worries - a conversational partner versed in the studies of the emotions and in coping with life-problems. I don't know. It's kind of hard to say. If I had that kind of money, I suspect I wouldn't have so many deeply personal problems, at least not of the kind that one talks about with a therapist. I have a money problem more than anything.

The eternal conflict is not God’s test of humanity. It is not a machination of Satan. It is just the way things worked out. It might be the only way in the entire universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it as a primary source of our creativity.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

Our great moral battle is not between good and evil, so argues Wilson, but between individual-level selection and group-level selection. I doubt this can make as great a poetic epic as Milton's "Paradise Lost", but maybe it is science.


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It might be supposed that the human condition is so distinctive and came so late in the history of life on Earth as to suggest the hand of a divine creator. Yet in a critical sense the human achievement was not unique at all. Biologists have identified about two dozen evolutionary lines in the modern world fauna that attained advanced social life based on some degree of altruistic division of labor. Most arose in the insects. Several were independent origins, in marine shrimp, and three appeared among the mammals, that is, in two African mole rats, and us. All reached this level through the same narrow gateway: solitary individuals, or mated pairs, or small groups of individuals built nests and foraged from the nest for food with which they progressively raised their offspring to maturity.

Until about three million years ago the ancestors of Homo sapiens were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago, however, groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire — the equivalent of nests — from which they foraged and returned with food, including a substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern Homo sapiens. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when the earlier prehuman ancestor Homo habilis turned increasingly to meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex.

Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

So it appeared that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us. We are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution to our social and political turmoil. To yield completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would dissolve society. To surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots — students of insects call them ants.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

A second diagnostic hereditary peculiarity of human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups in the first place. To be kept in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his tribe — is a large part of his identity. It also confers upon him to some degree or other a sense of superiority. When psychologists selected teams at random from a population of volunteers to compete in simple games, members of each team soon came to think of members of other teams as less able and trustworthy, even when the participants knew they had been selected at random.

All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs An amplification of this evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism and religious bigotry.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

The power of the group, the reality of racism. If Wilson is right about group-level selection, it does lend greater credence to racism and racial segregation. This is not to say that people of different races cannot get along together, even marry, as well as live and work together, but it is exceptional, it goes against the grain. If this were not true, we would have been able to achieve much more social harmony by now. Nevertheless, life between the races can be better or worse. Short of some kind of Hitlerian 'final solution', we have to live and work together. Naturally, we would like to make this as decent and fair as possible.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not implying that we are driven by instinct in the manner of animals. Yet in order to understand the human condition, it is necessary to accept that we do have instincts, and will be wise to take into account our very distant ancestors, as far back and in as fine a detail as possible. History is not enough to reach this level of understanding. It stops at the dawn of literacy, where it turns the rest of the story over to the detective work of archaeology; in still deeper time the quest becomes paleontology. For the real human story, history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.

-- Edward O. Wilson at The New York Times

In the world of science, a debate has been getting a little heated on a basic question of evolution. The eminent Edward O. Wilson has advanced a new model that supplants the overwhelming superiority of the long-held idea of individual selection. He argues that group-selection is just as important, calling his idea multilevel selection. Mr. Wilson is obviously not backing down.

I'm always getting flipped on these big questions. In the nineties, I thought I caught up with the big brains in thinking that there must be other intelligent life in the universe because of the practically infinite number of stars and planets whirling about. But I suppose one shoudn't be surprised that it is an open question, since no one can know such a thing with certainty, being safely beyond our very limited experience. So, whatever answer is popular for a generation is more a question of fashion.

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In "Alone in the Universe: Why our planet is unique", cosmologist John Gribbin makes a compelling case that no other planet could sustain life

AS BIG questions go, it's hard to get much bigger: Are we alone in the universe? Instinctively, it feels that there must be another intelligent civilisation out there peering through their telescopes at our pale blue dot. Modern astronomy reinforces this hunch. The Milky Way is just one of a trillion galaxies in the observable universe and contains just as many stars. As the haul of planets we discover around those stars grows, so does the feeling that it's only a matter of time before we find someone else sharing our cosmic patch.

In Alone in the Universe, John Gribbin dares to shatter that myth. Chapter by chapter, he describes how we are anything but an ordinary intelligence, living on an ordinary planet around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy. Instead, our existence relies on a series of remarkable cosmic coincidences.

Our solar system, for example, formed at a very fortuitous time and place within the Milky Way. Had it formed earlier or farther away from the galactic centre, it would not have had the supply of elements needed to build our rocky planets, or the reserves of metals our technological civilisation needs. Had it formed closer to the galactic centre, where the density of stars is greatest, our planet would likely have been sterilised - by a gamma ray burst, perhaps, or a star exploding as a supernova, or even a blast from the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of the galaxy.

Then there's the arrangement of our solar system and its debris. Earth has the rare privilege of being in a family of planets with more or less stable orbits. Our home is just the right distance from the sun for liquid water, while asteroids of the kind that killed off the dinosaurs are today mostly sequestered safely away in the asteroid and Kuiper belt. Without the right sort of collisions at the right time, Earth would have been a waterless world with a toxic atmosphere, constantly bombarded by cosmic rays.

Gribbin's argument proves compelling as he ranges over issues of astrophysics, geology, atmospheric chemistry and evolution. Although he cannot quantify exactly how the potential for life around those trillion trillion other suns whittles down to zero, you can feel any optimism that ET is out there ebb away with each turn of the page.

Alone in the Universe is thought-provoking and sobering. Gribbin makes any ideas of decamping to another Earth-like planet in the future seem absurd. Our telescopes might find seemingly similar planets around other stars, but these worlds will inevitably be nothing like ours. He concludes that we must look after the extraordinary planet we have. It has survived far worse catastrophe than climate change and will go on, but we won't.

-- Valerie Jamieson at New Scientist

Some weeks ago there was a stir in the news about the possible discovery of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. There was not much acceptance in physics circles, as such a finding would overturn Einstein's conclusions that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light. Indeed, I think the findings have already been corrected, though the experiment will soon be rerun.

I mention it in passing only because I recall during my more intellectually ambitious and delusional youth playing with this idea of a cosmic speed limit. I had wondered if there might have been a fatal conceptual flaw unrealized until I saw it, that is, the reason why the cosmic speed limit might appear to be the speed of light is because that limit actually represents the limit on what we can observe, since we are dependent on light for our observations and measurements. Might we not have confused the limit of what we can observe with the limit of how fast objects and energy may move in the universe. It was an exciting thought, to be able to correct Einstein. Such a ridiculous fool.



Dennis Overbye, "After Report on Speed, a Rush of Scrutiny" at The New York Times

Damon Poeter, "Boo! Hiss! Dutch Scientist Rains on Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Parade" at PCMag.com

Paul Rincon, "Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to be run again" at BBC

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory.

White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and bacteria, also mutate and change in response to the pressures of the metropolis. In short, the process of evolution is responding to New York and other cities the way it has responded to countless environmental changes over the past few billion years. Life adapts.

-- Cark Zimmer for The New York Times

Can't bedbugs just go extinct? We actually have not been afflicted by that plague yet, but one hears it is such a growing thing, that it is only a matter of time. Then how will I sleep?

A new book, "Physics of the Future" gives us an updated glimpse of the future:

A lot of the information Mr. Kaku rounds up and dispenses in “Physics of the Future” won’t be new to people who’ve kept up with the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. Yet it’s eye-popping. We’ll have X-ray vision and space elevators and live at least twice as long and be able to move things, perhaps even martinis, with our minds. We’ll go online, thanks to wired contact lenses, by blinking.

“We will view chemotherapy,” he writes, “like we view leeches of the past century.” We’ll watch televised football games, if we wish, as if from the 50-yard line.

This one also notes that the future can also be a race between all this good stuff and the not-so-good stuff such as global warming and Islamist terrorism.

I'm not going to put this book on my wish list, though. I no longer have that expectant feeling of seeing things in the semi-distant future, but count myself fortunate enough to have caught the Internet age while I still have my vision and can chew my own food. I'd rather stick to the classics of literature, or at least more stylized fare, but it can be useful even for me to have in mind some of the possible directions that history can take. It sounds like it might be fun. To be able to live twice as long is enough to boggle and tantalize the imagination and make one ache with covetousness.