Tables of Truth

I have written an enormous amount of blog post.  And they're the best blog posts, no buddy writes better blog posts. I swear.  ...okay, channeled a little too much Trump there. They're probably decent posts, but you'd never know; I've never really bother publishing most of them.

 I never feel like it's 'enough' to make a blog about,  "What am I really saying here, and why should anyone care?"  I go through 10 drafts of a posts, and ultimately decide to not post it. So, today I am going to try something else: Im gonna write a post and not even really bother editing it once. (okay...maybe once). It may be terrible...but at least I'll get my thoughts down somewhere and maybe build on it later.  I've decided to do this because I have been living under the assumption that if I write a post 10 times, and edit it to perfection, then I'll be happy to post it. That statement seems to be false, which leads me to the point I'd like to make today: deciding if a statement is true or false. 

In college I took a course in the math department in which we were taught how to "do a math proof". The starting point: a truth table. What's a truth table? This is one example that lays out the basics of whether a statement is true or not:

If you start off with an assumption 'p' (column 1) and reach the conclusion 'q' (column 2), then this conclusion is given by column 3.  The thought I particularly enjoy in this table is that if you start off with a false assumption, then the statement is true - regardless of whether you're conclusion is true or false. (Note rows 3 &4, and how the statement is label as true, either way).   When this was brought up in my math course several student's raised their hands and ask something along the lines: "Uhhh....why???". And the grad student said something to the extent: "Well, if you start off will a false assumption, then you can prove anything to be true." For example: If I assume 1+1=3 then I can prove that 1=0. (If anyone cares, here is my 'proof'). So, living under the pretext that 1+1=3 allows me to logically conclude that 1=0, which is obviously wrong.

I wish that we taught truth tables and logic in elementary or middle school math courses. Frankly, I think this course would probably be of more value to students than calculus, trig, and maybe even algebra. People could easily use it for any situation and it would immediately be helpful. Hell, I'm a freaking grad student in physics, and the amount of times I've bothered to do a damn integral to figure out an issue in lab could probably be counted on my hands (...only because Im an experimentalist.). But I use logic every single freaking minute Im in the lab. Heck, if we taught students this, it could be an entire year long course. Just look at how complicated these tables can get: 

I truly value this line of thinking, and it largely shapes the way I approach any problem that is given to me in grad school, and in life. Given the rise of fake news, and whimsical claims of various sources of news being fake, I think that thinking logically is particularly important.  It is one of the few ways to ensure that someone is not misleading you. 

Well, that's all I have to say for now.   :)

Spock's Journey

Recently I have pondered on my deepest wish,

I’ll spare you the details and just give you a little gist.

I want to pass on only my parent’s joyous loving nature,

And show that science is so much more than nomenclature.

But this is going to take my entire journey through space and time,

Like becoming an enlightened Spock,

I must know when to feel the thrills of emotions,

And to know when to it is just better to stop.

The CMB - Scholfield Huxley Edition

     I think there is something rather profound and beautiful about looking at the stars: you are literally looking back in time.  Thanks to the finite speed of light, it takes a measurable amount of time for light to travel from distant stars to our planet.  About 8 minutes from our star, the sun.  As you turn your eyes to further distances, you are investigating earlier times in our universe. Currently the furthest we can look, the edge of the observable universe, is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (The CMB).  A glow from what used to be a very hot Hydrogen plasma from our young universe stops us from being able to see any further.  This glow is from when our universe was about 380,000 years old.

"...looking at the stars: you are literally looking back in time."

     Perhaps the idea that we are looking in the past, and the fact that the universe is accelerating and that we cannot travel faster than the speed of light (because it would require infinite energy) and consequently cannot travel to these distant stars, motivates some physicist to think that "time is an illusion."  Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be able to upload our potentially quantum consciousness to a quantum computer and use  quantum wormholes to overcome ‘the illusion’ of time and hop around ‘the computer simulation’ that we are in.*  Sorry, I just devolved into a stream of consciousness/sci-fi.  But, even so, when we probe the edge of our collective understanding, scientific inquiry often ends up sounding like science fiction.  Many of these ideas will only become 'scientific fact' if they stand the test of time (i.e., a bunch of scientist arguing and trying to poke holes in it and making empirically objective tests for said ideas).

     Alright, back to CMB and how it tells us about the beginning of time.  Looking at the CMB is akin to looking at the universe with a heat camera and from these images we can measure both that the hot hydrogen plasma from the CMB (and hence the temperature of outer space) has cooled down to about 3K (-270C or -454F), and also observe that this surface is superbly smooth and isotropic (i.e. the same is all directions).  Then from this smoothness of the CMB surface temperature and its isotropic characteristic we have discovered that the entire freakin observable universe, before a period of rapid expansion called ‘inflation’, was smaller than the size of an atom. Now it should be said that, in true scientific fashion, our understanding of the early universe (and it’s size) has only just begun.  

"...from this smoothness of the CMB surface temperature and its isotropic characteristic we have discovered that the entire freakin observable universe, before a period of rapid expansion called ‘inflation’, was smaller than the size of an atom."

     But wait, if the CMB is from when our universe was nearly 400,000 years old, how exactly do we know anything from before this time period? Well, as our knowledge grows and our engineering is finely tuned to be more and more precise, we slowly make more and more rigorous claims about the nature of the early universe.  Through this improved sensitivity we can begin to carefully study the subtle asymmetries that do exist on this surface, and from those studies we can gain insight into the period before the CMB, the period of 'inflation'. Understanding this point in time of our universe should help reveal some interesting aspects of the  quantum nature of our early universe (because it was really small) and, in turn, help us shed some light on the connection between quantum mechanics and gravity.

     One of the experiments trying to study these asymmetries, or what the specialist call the polarization of light from the CMB – where quantum behavior will be encoded – is called BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization). You may have heard about this group when they published some data claiming to see signatures of gravity waves from this inflationary period, but it was later deemed that dust in our solar system contributed to the signal more than originally thought.  This observation might have been correct, but we cannot say it with strong scientific confidence because it was not a '5 sigma signal', so we’re not 99.9999% confident that it’s right and hence it is not a 'scientific fact'...yet (I really hate that phrase.).  As I understand it, by precisely modeling the subtle asymmetries in the temperature of the CMB we can gain insight into the period before the CMB, or inflationary cosmology.

"... was not a '5 sigma signal', so we’re not 99.9999% confident that it’s right and hence it is not a 'scientific fact'...yet"

     With that, I would like to leave you with the inspiration for this post: a slightly personalized version of a piece about Scholfield Huxley from the Spoon River Anthology. (Click here see the original). 

GOD! ask me not to record your wonders,

I admit the stars and the suns

And the countless worlds.

But I have measured their distances

And weighed them and discovered their substances.

I have devised wings for the air,

And keels for water,

And horses of iron for the earth.

I  have lengthened the vision you gave me and saw the beginning of time,

And the hearing you gave me a million times,

I have leaped over space with speech,

And taken fire for light out of the air.

I have built great cities and bored through the hills,

And bridged majestic waters.

I have written the Illiad and Hamlet;

And I have explored your mysteries,

And searched for you without ceasing,

And found you again after loosing you

In hours of weariness --

And I ask you:

How would you like to create a sun

And the next day have the worms

Slipping in and out between your fingers?

     Thanks to my Green Shirt Studio's course (and Sommer!) for helping me find this inspiration. Also, here is my dramatic reading of the poem. And thanks to BYOT for motivating the "just f**king do it" mentality and actually filming this dramatic reading!)

     Now, I just wanted to quickly add, as I was research/thinking about this entry, I realized a previous topic could be involved.  As it turns out, Rayleigh scattering - the same scattering that causes our sky to be blue - was at play during the inflation period of our universe and could potentially be a useful tool to analyze the slight asymmetries in the CMB temperature and consequently tell us more about the inflationary time period.   Although, an expert in this field field could better tell me the actual relevance of this form of light/matter interaction.

     This poem is full of science...so more personalizations to come.

* Italics indicate that these ideas are not scientifically rigorous. I don’t actually know how connected, scientifically speaking, they are -but found them to be fun sci-fi ideas.

And it happens again...

So, I'm a little sick of the I am Internet. Not because of the Internet itself - that's an amazing tool. I'm sick of it because of one simple thing: us. I am sick and tired of when a (name a socially contentious event) happens and I can already predict exactly what my news feed will be plastered with for the next couple of weeks; until we get distracted with the next issue and never actually make progress as a society. "Guns aren't the problem!! It's the people" vs "Guns need to be banned!!" It's like the most dysfunctional marriage ever. We argue for hours on end, just screaming our point, never listening to the other side and then we go to sleep. Only to wake up the next day facing the same problems and to never bother to try and reach some middle ground. And what sucks is it's not exactly our fault: it's the fault of our leaders who just feed off of the controversy to serve their own interests. Or perhaps it is ultimately our fault because we vote for people who don't know how to compromise.

When did this happen? When did we become so polarized on any important issue, that all we can do is yell our point. To behave as if compromise is somehow equivalent to evil and a dismissal of our ideals, instead of a necessary part of a relationship. Because all of society is in a relationship with each other. Maybe it's always been the case and the Internet just makes it easier to feed flames into the fire. Now we don't have to argue with another human face, we're just arguing with a screen of light, and we can so easily find confirmation of our thoughts from the same screen. Maybe it's just the way things are now. Or maybe it's on us to realize the nature of our new tool and to adapt our behavior and not feed into the extremities we are tricked into supporting.

"Science is a LIAR sometimes" - The Scientific Process

I love "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia". It's probably my favorite show.  And this is not only because they all have exactly my humor, but because they bring up so many fun, and interesting points. I just started thinking about what I am going to call "The Mac Defense", in which the character Mac talks about how "scientist are liars sometimes". His argument highlights a thought I have been thinking recently and is particularly on point to the scientific process, and is a critical aspect to good science communication. And that is the fact that scientist are wrong about a lot of things - but often not in the way that society perceives it - and poor science communication makes them look like liars. 

Firstly, science is WRONG sometimes. When you are trying to push our fundamental understanding of nature forward, trying to understand something that we - the collective society 'we' - don't understand , you can't just sit around saying 'I don't know'. You gotta choose a direction, derive rigorous testable experiments, pass on the stuff you just can't make sense of and give the strongest conclusion possible with the data at hand. You're bound to make mistakes on the way. Rigorous experiments say what conclusions we can make and with what level of confidence, and this nuance is usually where the mistakes will be found. 

For example, I was reading about the positron (related to part of my 'Clouds' project for everyday physics) and I read this passage on wikipedia: 

"Dmitri Skobeltsyn first observed the positron in 1929 a Wilson cloud chamber...

Likewise, in 1929 Chung-Yao Chao, a graduate student at Caltech, noticed some anomalous results that indicated particles behaving like electrons, but with a positive charge, though the results were inconclusive and the phenomenon was not pursued...

Carl David Anderson discovered the positron on August 2, 1932,[13] for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936.

 Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in Paris had evidence of positrons in old photographs when Anderson's results came out, but they had dismissed them as protons."

I loved this passage because it so beautifully highlights how science really works. Chung-Yao Chao had a discovery in front of him that could have led to a Nobel prize, but didn't really understand what was going on there and explored some other stuff - then along comes Mr. Anderson and he picks up a Nobel. And not only that, the Curies had also discovered this particle - the first evidence for antimatter - and made a mistake and dismissed the events as something else. Something already known. When we push the horizons of knowledge, many mistakes will be made. (Oh, and of course a soviet Russian did it first. ).  And to the second point: if science is poorly communicated, whether it be due to actively saying something slightly wrong or just saying nothing at all, it leads to a 'Mac Defense' that conflates scientific 'mistakes' with a lake of scientific 'rigor' and being a liar. 

My most direct example of this is global warming. I often hear two sides get shouted in regards to global warming. One is "There is still debate in the scientific community about global warming" and "There is no debate. Global warming is real" and I feel like they're just shouting passed each other instead of actually talking. (Thanks to the media mostly.)  Yes, there is still debate in the scientific community about Global Warming. It's science - people are always fucking debating about something. That's part of doing science.  But this debate isn't about, so far as I understand it, global warming being real, but something more along the lines of "How much can the earth heat up before we're fucked".  (But don't trust me, as Mac would say, the "Stupid Science Bitch", read something with sources!...and this is one of my projects now.)

I have a strong suspicion that this nuance in what the argument is actually about, is one thing that the media glosses over - if not completely ignores for the sake of viewership, causing confusion. 

This is a random thought.   I'm gonna go ahead and post it and get the details done latter