The God Particle

Electricity is the name of today’s game. This passage goes over the first batteries made by Volta (improvements on the work done by Galvani (who, oddly, used the musculature of frogs for experimentation), and then covers Coulomb measuring the strength of the electric charges, and goes on to Oersted recognizing that magnetism and electricity are linked (he saw a compass needle jump to point at a wire with current moving through it).

Next up is Michael Faraday, who provided a lot of nomenclature for the work being done (ion, cathode, anode, for example) and who recognized that a changing magnetic field could be used to induce an electric current, which allowed him to create the first electric motor and the dynamo — tools that have since become the foundation of all modern electrical power. The author notes that Faraday was more interested in continuing to pursue new facts and perform experiments than in finding uses for the things he made, famously telling the Prime Minister of England that he did not know the usefulness of the dynamo, but wagered that one day the government would tax it.

Faraday also introduced fields of force, which Lederman harks back to Roger Boscovich, and the idea of particles as mathematical points, not solid objects as in Newton’s conception. This brings about the difficult topic of how a field actually works, and as part of that, whether there is a speed of transmission of force (and what it is). James Clerk Maxwell (the author notes that it is pronounced klark, which I did not know) enters the story here to provide a mathematical basis for Faraday’s work. Interesting things about Faraday time: he was not just incredibly poor growing up, but he had no formal education in physical sciences, held no degree, and didn’t write his work out in mathematical form because he was essentially incapable of it. Instead he wrote in largely non-technical prose to explain his ideas and results.

While Maxwell originally intended to provide Faraday’s work with mathy foundations, he ended up noticing something surprising after working the numbers out: the speed of transmission of forces was the same speed that had been found for the speed of light a few years prior. That experiment, done by Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau who used the speed of a toothed-wheel and a complex system of mirrors which a light shone through, sounds pretty darn cool! People didn’t really think highly of Maxwell’s work at first — it is very dense and complicated, and the idea that the transmission of force was non-instantaneous was still unpopular. The idea that light was the mechanism of transmission of force also seemed bizarre.

Not too much later, Heinrich Hertz did some experiments that proved Maxwell’s work, and at the same time he simplified Maxwell’s complex math into a system of four simple equations that demonstrate a high level of symmetry and stand as a testament to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. This popularized Maxwell’s ideas quite a bit, and now his contribution to physics is regarded to be one of the most important of any. The electromagnetic force propagates at roughly 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second: cool stuff.

The last part of this reading is all about the discovery of the electron. Many people were experimenting with cathode rays in the last part of the 1890s – just hook electrodes into a sealed glass tube and pump as much air out as possible, then let a small amount of a specific gas in, and send a voltage through it. It lights up. When extremely small amounts of the gas are present, there’s essentially just a ray visible, and that’s what gets called a “cathode ray”.

People doing experiments realized that you could change the beam’s course using magnets, and by measuring how much force had to be applied to move the beam, were able to figure out properties of the particles in the beam. When they realized that these particles were much smaller than Hydrogen, the idea was out: the term ‘electron’ was used to refer to whatever this new particle, a building block of the chemical atom, must be.

Ringworld

Louis Wu and his motley crew are assembled! This passage was mostly just getting Teela on board. We hear a little bit about luck, get the description of the Earth’s “Birthright Lotteries”, which are part of the planetary population-control in place, and also learn a bit about Puppeteer psychology — in particular that Nessus is a manic-depressive, which explains his departures from fearful living.

More notes on seeing plot points and story elements: I am realizing how clearly and simply the character motivations are laid out: Speaker-To-Animals “wants a name” in his native language, which is granted by his society’s patriarch, and Nessus “wants to breed”, which is a privilege granted by his society’s patriarch. Louis Wu just gets bored and thinks this would be an interesting departure from the social monotony he’s used to, and Teela is in love with Louis / “wants to save the world”. It’s almost ugly how plain all of their motivations are! It’s also worth noting that the human motivations are two-dimensional at the least, while the alien ones are essentially “do A to get B”.

Notes

I checked my reading time tonight. For the first ten pages of The God Particle, I took 25 minutes, and for the second ten pages, I took 32 minutes (I was also eating during that period). While reading Ringworld, both the first and second ten pages took about 13 minutes. I was much happier to skim Ringworld more quickly, since I’ve read it before, but it’s also a bit smaller of a book than The God Particle is. I think that the reading level may also be a bit lower, but I haven’t got any data to back that up!

Tomorrow, I’ll begin reading 30 pages of each of 3 different books, instead of 20 pages of each of 2 books. We’ll find out how possible that is to accomplish — it’s a jump from 40 to 90 pages per day, and that might be too much. If Ringworld is a lower bound and God Particle is an upper bound, I can expect about 20 minutes per 10 pages read, which means I’ll need 180 minutes of reading time tomorrow. I haven’t decided on a third book to pick up yet — maybe The Stars My Destination, or maybe something outside of science or science fiction. My selection in that respect is a little limited.

One last note: This weekend my friend visited, and while we were out on the town (seeking chocolate milkshakes from McDonald’s), we indirectly witnessed a gruesome event. We were present in the cafeteria of the Eaton Centre here in Toronto when a gunman opened fire to kill one man and wounded six others, including a young teenager. McDonalds is slightly set into an alcove from the rest of the cafeteria, so while the vast crowd of people enjoying their Saturday fled and shouted, we (along with the other people in McDonalds) hid behind chairs and tables, and were soon allowed to exit via the kitchen door into the concrete hallways which ring the mall. After remaining in a locked washroom for several minutes, an order to evacuate the building came over the announcement system, and we found our way to an emergency exit.

I’m very glad that my friend and I were unharmed, and I wish the injured a speedy recovery. This appears to have been a gang-related shooting which harmed innocent bystanders. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the experience since yesterday, but I do not yet have conclusive thoughts on the subject. My recent reading of Stand on Zanzibar has put the topic of Muckers near the front of my mind — I searched to see if John Brunner was still alive to email him, but he died in 1995. My friend and I have tried to make relative light of the situation, because there’s little else that we can do. So far though, I’m not sure if I am dismayed by the lack of profound thoughts that have come out of the experience, or if I’m dismayed by my want to profit in some way from a tragedy like this.

In the end, I think finding positives in a situation — even philosophical ones — could be argued as callousness or pragmatism, or inhumane or thoroughly human, without any side laying claim to ultimate right. I would personally prefer to have something to take from this event; specifically something that can be shared or taught that will help improve the world. Unfortunately, no such thing is as yet forthcoming, and may never be.

I decided to re-read Ringworld, as it’s still somewhat in my mind from a reading a few months ago, and I know that there’s nothing too challenging in it. It’s also pretty entertaining. It suits speed-reading perfectly. Given my schedule plans, I’m 20 pages in now, and I’ll be 40 pages in tomorrow, then I’ll start reading 30 pages/day on Monday, which will take me to 250 by next Sunday, and at 40 pages/day after that, I’ll finish it on the following Tuesday. (I’ll read the extra 10 pages or so needed to finish it Tuesday night).

Hopefully at the end of it, I’ll be a much better speed reader than I am now! I suffered considerably lowered comprehension on that passage. Anyway, I’ve kept a friend waiting while I completed today’s readings — I look forward to more progress tomorrow!

The God Particle

We’ll see how well I can recall the things I read! We finished up with Newton, and discussed some of the great Chemists who helped search for the atom (some without knowing it). Notably, I can recall John Dalton, who proposed the “atomic theory” of chemistry, despite getting a lot of the details wrong. There’s also Boyle, who did experiments with pressures, and Lavois, who Lederman said was the chemists’ equivalent to Newton. He showed that there … I can’t remember. He was in France, and was killed by guillotine in the 1794.

I had to go look it up. Right. Lavoisier contributed the modern names of chemical elements, like “sulphur dioxide” instead of wacky stuff like “butter of arsenic”. He also is responsible for our knowledge that any substance can take fluid, liquid, or solid forms, and that combustion is a chemical reaction. He was an extremely accurate scientist.

Torricelli discovered air pressure and made the first barometer, and discovered that there must be vacuum, which was created inside of the barometers depending on the air pressure. We also briefly touched on William Prout, who believed that the indivisible a-tom was hydrogen, and from hydrogen, all other things were composed. The idea got thrown out because, for example, Chlorine has a weight of 35.5. It’s actually that there’s a Chlorine isotope that weighs 35 and another that weighs 37, and it just appears to be a uniform substance of weight 35.5. But at the time, a half-weight killed the idea that a bunch of Hydrogen could be arranged and shoved together to make Chlorine.

Then there’s Mendeleev, and this one is the coolest in my mind. I knew that he was the creator of the periodic table — it’s one of the most amazing things we’ve accomplished. Lederman notes that one hangs now in essentially every laboratory and classroom in existence, and that’s our tribute paid to Mendeleev. What I didn’t know was that Mendeleev figured it out by playing cards. He played a game similar to solitaire and had the elements with their qualities written out on cards, and he noticed that there was a spacing of 8 between several of them which exhibited similar properties. He tried arranging them such that there were 8 vertical columns, increasing by weight. He also decided not to try to fill in the gaps, allowing for unknown elements to sit there. The setup wasn’t widely regarded, until new elements discovered fit perfectly into the table, with the expected properties and at the expected weights.

In 1907 when he died, some of his students marched in his funeral procession behind him holding up a banner with his periodic table on it. It’s a mind-bogglingly amazing discovery.

The author notes though, that the periodic table slightly scared scientists of the time, because it showed that there were a lot of these “atoms”, and that made the idea of a simple, elegant organization to the universe with common building blocks a lot less likely. At least it showed that there may be an order within the apparent chaos!

Ringworld

First off, here’s a warning that this post will have Ringworld spoilers.

Right off the bat in Ringworld, Larry Niven starts dropping clues about the later plot. Doing a re-reading is neat, because I get to see some of the longer-term structure of the story get built. I’m impressed by the transporters, the revelation of the hyperdrive ship, discussion of the puppeteers and their analysis of human-kzin relations, and evolution right off the bat.

If you’re in need of definitions:

Puppeteer: A three-legged, two-headed cowardly vegetarian species that discovered that the galactic core was blowing up, and which began a mass migration out of known space roughly 200 years ago. Their name implies that they are wiley. They’re good businessmen, very clever.

Kzin (plural: kzin, adjective: kzinti) are giant supermuscular hyper-aggressive cats. We’ve been at war with them multiple times, and won multiple times. Now they have nothing to fight us with. Very high placement on concepts of honour. They like to eat hot, raw meat (like a fresh kill), and drink hot alcoholic beverages.

Oh no!

I read Stand on Zanzibar yesterday, and then I read 10 pages of The God Particle… and fell asleep! I woke up this morning with my glasses and book nearby, lying on my bed. So this counts as my first failure!

I’m not too worried about having had a failure to complete my readings. I woke up on my own time and read the remaining 10 pages of The God Particle, and now I’m making this post. But it has got me thinking about the specific way I’ve been reading. Back on Monday, I chose these books so that I could force myself to read quickly. I haven’t been doing a good job of that — I’ve been vocalizing, slipping back, and reading mostly single words at a time.

I think that I’ve been reading slowly because I’ve been doing a lot of reading-while-walking, to help fit the reading into my day easier. Speed reading (especially while learning) takes considerable focus, as well as stability of the book and preferably, constant light. While walking to work, I am paying at least half-attention to crossing streets and the like, the book moves as I walk, and shadows regularly change the light on the book! It’s very hard to speed read during this — but that’s not an excuse. If I’m going to try to achieve 30 pages / book on 3 books each day next week, I must begin to speed read.

It’s a tough to learn speed reading on any new book though — to really learn speed reading you have to initially sacrifice comprehension. The comprehension will catch back up as you become used to the pattern of catching words while your eyes move. It’s mostly about getting a steady flow of eyesight down the page and forcing yourself not to vocalize. Then you can start trying to pull phrases into your mind as your eye sweeps over them, and from there, pick up details that didn’t fit with a phrase. Ideally, an eye-fixture should be an entire line or a half of a line, and somehow people read multiple lines at once? I’ve never really grokked that bit of it, but maybe I will when I’ve got a wider fixture.

I’m worried about the effects my eyesight will have on my ability to speed-read effectively. I do not possess truly binocular vision – I am normally seeing “more” out of one of my eyes than the other. This may hinder my ability to swiftly recognize and interpret fixtures, or it may make my ability to speed-read more situation-dependent than for someone with better eyesight. We shall see.

Back to the annoyance of the comprehension-drop, I’m considering switching Stand on Zanzibar out for something I’ve read before, or which I don’t care about reading every word of. Zanzibar has become a little like a cheesecake — I appreciate every little bit of it. It’s too dense and too jumpy and too subtle and too good to let myself scan over when my comprehension goes to crap, so, like Red Mars, I will have to place it aside for now. I’ll write about what I’m picking up in the next post.

The God Particle

This passage finished up with Galileo and moved on to Newton. Big revelations covered are F=ma and F=GM1M2/R. I recall learning these things, but have lost the knowledge I gained about them. I’m kind of wishing for a physics textbook now — I’m thinking about purchasing “Head First Physics” off of amazon, but maybe I’ll stop at a used book store to check if they have any old undergraduate intro textbooks first.

This book is doing a good job of delivering the philosophy of the science. I feel like Leo has reached firmer footing in recent history, and he’s doing a great job of speaking to the search for an elegant model of our universe. He regularly brings up the drive of experimentalists to describe what they find without interpreting it, and to question whether they have made mistakes and how best to account for them. Their work is incredibly noble. I think I must be a theorist at heart, because I can’t help but try to find reasons for things. That means being wrong very often, but I feel like reasons lead to greater understanding. There will likely be more discussion on these topics elsewhere in the book.

Stand on Zanzibar

This passage was heavy on the political intrigue side of things. There was also a context from Chad Mulligan, and an odd prayer-like passage that might have been a reference to something I’m too young for. A short focus on a geneticist with family problems who is harried by some youths was included — I wonder about the conclusion the story is heading toward. There are elements of Artificial Intelligence, political subversion, genetic attacks, terrorism, religious events, all kinds of wacky stuff thrown into the mixing pot in this first hundred pages. I can’t wait to see what pieces stick!

The God Particle

This passage shifted focus from Democritus to Galileo. The author (who I’m gonna just start calling Leo pretty soon) talks about Galileo’s use of inclined planes, the likelihood that he did actually perform the famous leaning tower experiment, but as a spectacle, not for his own knowledge. Apparently, Galileo’s father was a musician who greatly influenced musical theory by performing experiments with cords of differing length and tension! Leo suggests that this was a great influence on Galileo toward performing experiments.

This is where I’m gonna stop and rag on the author for a bit again.

Look, Leo must be a heck of a smartie, and he’s clearly not an awful writer, but I’ve got some gripes so far. First, he does not have any citations. He keeps talking about “what people believed” re: Democritus, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Thales — and I think it’s a bunch of bullcrap. I doubt very much that he knows what these people were thinking, and I’d really like him to back it up. That wouldn’t matter a crazy bunch if not for…

Second: Lederman appears to have a completely unsubstantiated hatred of Philosophy. Particularly of Plato and Aristotle. He seems fine using the Socratic dialogue, but rags constantly on those guys. I’m not sure if as a kid he got beaten up by a kid wearing a t-shirt labelled “THE ACADEMY” or something, but it’s ridiculous. Aristotle was the founder of empiricism, which is pretty much the ism that describes experimentation’s role in the scientific method. Throughout the whole book, Lederman has been talking about how important and vital and great experimentation is, but he’s got no love for poor old Aristotally Rockin’.

Some part of me believes that he’s only doing it in jest. It’s possible that he doesn’t really snort at Aristotle and blame Plato/Aristotle’s schools of thought as “one of the things that made the dark ages so dark”. His nature so far has been very jokey, and while informative, the book feels like an easy pop-science read so far. It’s like I’m watching a shallow discovery channel special rendered in text, with itsy bitsy tads of extra info stuffed in edgewise.

I don’t want to speak too ill of the book; I’m enjoying the read and as Leo’s got an easy, fairly readable lightness for the subject. I’ve learned a fair deal about corners of particle physics I knew nothing about, and I’ve learned a lot about its main thrusts so far. He just isn’t Isaac Asimov, and he isn’t Richard Feynman, and he isn’t Stephen Hawking, and he isn’t even Carl Sagan. (I’m sorry, Carl. I got tired of the anti-religion arguments during the audiobook version of Pale Blue Dot. We get it. The universe is bigger than a zealot’s devotion to a god or cause. And Contact has serious pacing issues.)

What I’m really trying to say is, I miss Isaac Asimov.

Stand on Zanzibar

Brunner lines them up and knocks them out of the park. This book is great. Hints of international intrigue and corporate espionage have sneaked into the novel, while the humanist lament continues with a particular focus on race. I’m excited to learn more, and worried I’m getting my hopes up too high. Still making me think, think, think.

Extra Stuff

I am reading faster than I was before, and I’m doing a positively stellar job of integrating reading into the day — such that each day feels full, but not quite overfull. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been speed-reading much yet. I find I can get into it with Lederman’s book when I have a lot of focus and quiet and I’m not walking while I read (much of my reading is done on the walk to work), and I have done it once or twice with Zanzibar. I’ll keep working.

Another game of floor hockey today –  we played hard and had an awesome 3-1 lead going into half, but luck turned against us and we lost 5-3 (though there may have been a goal we didn’t count, so 5-4).  Still working hard at improving, and I’m playing even better than I was when I last wrote about it. The game was on Bain, which is south of Danforth just east of Broadview. Got to see the excellent skyline and then walked from Broadview to Christie, where I read my 20 pages of Zanzibar and, in the growing chill of night, opted to transit home via subway.

Looking forward to having Mike over for a visit on the weekend, and to sleeping in!

The God Particle

Leon Lederman may really be a great physicist, but he is not a really great writer. (that I’ve seen so far, at least)

He’s not awful, mind you, he just … really shouldn’t have tried to write a socratic dialogue in a fake dream sequence as the opening to a book about the history of physics. It’s very cute, but mixing in bad physicist puns and Democritus making time travel jokes and constantly ragging on Plato and name-dropping famous physicists and artisans that he’s saying he met — it’s overstated. Eventually, I was able to stop being super-conscious of the fact that I’m reading something Leon Lederman made up about himself, and Democritus became a character, and they were having a dialogue, but that was >10 pages into the damn thing.

I’ve digressed from the book’s focus throughout the exchange: it’s a history of presocratic greek philosophers and some concepts they played around with, like indivisible particles, the composition of the universe(one element and which, or many and what about them), the aether, and other cool stuff like multiple universes or the earth floating in water.

The author also makes a lot of sleeping on accelerator floor jokes. I’m not sure if the quantity is representing the reality, or if he just wants to make sure it’s known that that’s a thing that happens.

Oh, one last note: 137 is a pretty cool number I hadn’t even heard of before! It’s the inverse of the fine structure constant. 1/137 is that constant, and it’s apparently a dimensionless number that comes up all over the place in physics out of the speed of light, the charge carried by an electron, the force between two point-charges, and the ratio of the energy of an photon and the frequency of its wave.

Apparently, physicists love (or love to hate) this number, because it’s not a particularly nice number, and because it’s dimensionless, it’s not a weird number just because we made a meter a certain size or anything. If an independent species somewhere else in the universe identified this set of constants (in whatever units they might come up with), they too would find 1/137ish, provided they’re using base 10. (It has the same value in other bases, just not the same representation).

Anyway, the author presented some fun stories about the number and famous physicists and suggested that if a physicist ever needs help in a big city they should just put the number 137 on a sign and stand worriedly on a street holding it up, and other physicists will eventually come to help, because it’s a somewhat universal sign of “bleck oh no”. It was also the number that Lederman chose for his house at Fermilab while he was the director of the institution.

Stand on Zanzibar

In these pages, John Brunner delivered a compelling and awe-inspiring commentary on modern society and the nature of our existence within it. He notes that animals in overpopulated environments become irritable and violent toward members of their own species — even fertile members of the opposite sex or their own young. Looking at us as territorial and pack-natured animals, he describes how population density and availability of territory affect our behaviour.

Brunner suggests that property and privacy operate as abstractions for territory because real territory is scarce, and that personal wealth has a large impact on their availability. He also makes sure to note our commercial world’s mass-produced, impersonal nature that drives us to continually replace (and thus never bond with) our possessions is destroying the idea of property even for the affluent.

He contends that when we have territory taken from us, we revert to our pack-nature, and  attempt to regain what we’ve lost. This is posited to be a part of why crime and gang activity is highest in low-income areas of inner cities: population density is high and privacy and property are scarce. He suggests that a similar dynamic helps armies to make killers out of regular people: remove your privacy by making you live in a barracks and make it so that everything you own is really the unit’s. Your unit becomes your gang, and you are convinced to channel your psychotic nature in your gang’s fight for its territory.

He also notes that our primary means of punishment is very similar to the military. You’re taken from the abstractions that hold your identity: your space and possessions, and put into a featureless place you constantly share with other people, while wearing clothes you don’t own, under constant watch and random check-ups in your “room”, with a see-through door.

The delivery wasn’t perfect. His comments have aged at least a little in 45 years. But he’s writing with 2008 in mind. That helps to make the whole thing so surreal — he’s really pegged some of this stuff. Some of it has just gone on and gotten worse since he wrote the book. But he obviously doesn’t see perfectly to now. Reading this will keep me thinking for a while to come; it was a great bit of writing for introspection’s sake at the least.

Lastly, a little bit about its delivery: The book is structured into a few different “types” of vignettes. Some are the “main threads” which follow common characters, some are newscasts or lists of advertisements which give us some insight into the world the characters inhabit, and its values. Some are tangential characters who help provide some background or an introduction to a topic, space, or situation. And some are “direct dialog” written as excerpts of books by Chad Mulligan, usually addressed straight to the reader.

The rest of the book feels a little bit difficult to manage. There is a lot of made up jargon and breaks between viewpoints, and the world feels like it’s cold and mean, while keeping constantly in your face trying to sell you things. The bits of context provided in Mulligan’s books use direct, simple, unjargoned language. They’re given in long passages and fill in lots of details. It makes me, as a reader, thirst for hearing from Mr. Mulligan, just for a change of pace — on top of that, everything he gets to say is thought-provoking. I’m still waiting for an easy definition of “hipcrime” — it’s either the crime of being hip or the crime of being unhip. Apparently a reader commits a hipcrime by reading the book on hipcrime. Sufficient, but not necessary.