Comets have long been portents of change. They challenge the rote repetition of our skies. An astute observer of the sky will perhaps have recently noticed a new object in the sky, a comet, present for the last few weeks (you would have had to look east just before sunrise near the star Spica). This was the comet ISON. But comet ISON, having strayed too close to the Sun, has been mostly annihilated. If there is a comet in the sky and no one sees it, was it ever really there?
William Carlos William's poem, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, captures the essence of comet ISON's elusive journey around the Sun. Brueghel, the Felmish Renaissance painter, carefully recorded the event like a faithful astronomer, but the worker is not keen on the sky and Icarus goes wholly unnoticed. It is just the same to the worker, for had they noticed Icarus or not it would likely make no difference to their toils in the field. And similarly ISON went largely unnoticed.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
ISON made a brief appearance to the unaided eye for a few days before it grazed the sun and then uncoiled itself. But to the learned astronomer ISON is still interesting. Comets are rare objects in the inner solar system so even a dead comet is a chance to learn something, in fact, further spectroscopic observations of this dead comet's remains will continue to tell us exactly what it was made of. There is a legacy here.
I have a new online project and venue that I have launched! Common Observer is a collaborative online venue of science, art, philosophy, and culture. The tagline is "Common Observer, uncommon observations." The idea is that we must reason as if we are the most common observer, but that doesn't preclude uncommon observations. An uncommon observation is something that challenges our human condition of common observation. A poem, a theorem, a dance, an equation, a painting, a story, a novel, or a theoretical truth may all be uncommon observations about the world we inhabit.
Yet fear not, I will still post on The Astronomist, in particular I will cross post any original scientific content I create. The reason for this shift of focus is at least two fold. First, it is hard to find time to generate original thoughtful content while finishing a PhD so Common Observer will have more aggregated content. Second, while so many people love astronomy, I feel a broader forum of wider interests will better grip reader's attention, as well as my own attention.
I hope that Common Observer can be a successful collaborative project. In order to realize that goal I am currently searching for culture, art, philosophy, or poetry contributors. So please check out the new project, share it with friends and colleagues, or contact me if you have inclinations to collaborate. Follow Common Observer on twitter, subscribe to the RSS, or just visit the site often. Thanks for the continued support.
I met Don Winget years ago on a cloudy night in the control room of the Otto von Struve Telescope. His enthusiasm and excitement was overflowing. I could hardly see his face, lit eerily by red lights, but his words painted a picture of far away white dwarf stars. These stars are pulsating, cooling, and perhaps intertwined with mysterious undiscovered axion particles. He continues extraordinary pursuits. He is looking for white dwarfs on earth with the Z Machine. The Z Machine releases a powerful electrical discharge over a brief amount of time to create plasma, X-rays, shock waves, and an electromagnetic pulse. The Z Machine releases several times the combined energy output of all power plants on earth for a few brief nanoseconds with each shot. Usually it does nuclear weapons research, but this wonderful research aims to simulate aspects of white dwarf stars on earth and it is inspiring art.
The way of the future is fusion. I dream of a world where humans have harnessed the power of the Sun. Clean, safe, energy. But there is no clear path to fusion. The most exciting possibility for a future with fusion may be the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER. ITER is not the only option of course. Previously, I have discussed the National Ignition Facility or NIF which has pioneered unique technologies is the field, but their success is not ensured. Many small research projects around the world are also struggling to realize the dream of fusion, but with budget shortfalls and increasing pressure to produce results we as a society may shortsightedly end the dreams of a fusion future.
Fusion is what powers the Sun and all stars in our Universe. Fusion is the joining of two or more separate atomic nuclei into a larger nuclei. Fusion can create energy because the mass of the input and output nuclei are not necessarily equal in mass. An overview of what fusion is and why it is so important can be seen on my previous post on Fusion for the Future. Many scientists in the field acknowledge that a rapid development of fusion is unlikely, much less a commercial development, but there is hope. A reasonable time frame may be half a century before we see a world powered by the same process which drives the Sun. It will be an almost entirely clean, limitless, reliable, and safe source of power.
Christopher Llewellyn Smith states some cold hard numbers that are worth mentioning again. The price of ITER is at least 13 billion Euros or $17 billion. This cost is justified and dwarfed by the magnitude of the energy usage on Earth which amounts to a $5 trillion dollar a year market (I checked some of these numbers and they seem approximately correct. Did you know that you can download the International Energy Agency's annual reports as an iPhone or iPad app?). Particularly shocking are the subsides to fossil fuels which are over $500 billion a year worldwide (I am not so sure about this number, but the United States alone subsides fossil fules to the tune of $10 billion a year) while the subsides to renewables are only $45 billion worldwide. Smith says that the renewable energy sources of wind, bio, geothermal, and marine will never be able to meet the world's energy needs a current consumption rates. We must use solar, fission, or fusion energy.
It is a curious thing to ask a scientist to speculate on the future, but these two scientists have indulged us with a time frame for achieving fusion. Maybe the middle of this century at best they say. What makes fusion so difficult?
The key to releasing the energy of the Sun is forcing the nuclei of atoms close enough together for them to overcome their electrical repulsion and allow the strong force which binds nuclei to merge the nuclei together. Such favorable conditions for atoms to smash into each other can only occur under extreme temperatures and pressures, like say at the center of a star, but it is almost impossible to hold a star on earth. Anything which is hot enough to undergo fusion is also hot enough to burn through any container, thus we must contain something without quite touching it. Enter the magnetic doughnut known as the tokamak. A tokamak is a toroidal or doughnut shaped container that uses magnetic fields to confine plasma. Plasma is a state of matter where all the atoms are ionized (the electrons that normally orbit the protons in the nucleus have escaped)—and at these temperatures the atoms contained in the tokamak are definitely ionized. Magnetic fields apply a force on the charged particles of plasma such that the plasma can be corralled and kept away from the walls of the container. In an actual tokamak huge magnets encircle the enclosure as shown in the figure here where the magnetic coils and the ITER plasma surface is shown. The colors and contour lines indicate the magnetic field strength which is not quite perfect, the lines are wavy, due to deviations from perfect symmetry in the structure because the tordioal magnetic field is made of a finite number of magnetic coils. The ITER tokamak will be huge. Check out the tiny little person (bottom left) in the image below.
The complexity of this machine is astounding. One key challenge that must be overcome is the confinement of the plasma in a controlled manner. The Confinement Topical Group will determine exactly how to accomplish the confinement and avoid the performance degrading effects of Edge Localized Modes or (ELM modes). The hotter the plasma is the more internal plasma pressure is that must be balanced by stronger magnetic pressure fields; we could view this system in analogy to a balloon where that the plasma is the air under pressure and balloon's walls are the magnetic fields. The exact ratio of the plasma's internal current, the physical size of the tokamak, and the torodial magnetic field is a carefully tuned parameter to balance the gas temperature and magnetic pressures which does not yet have a known optimal configuration (the goal is I/aB < 2.5 where I is the plasma current, a is the minor radius, and B is the toroidal field on axis). It has been observed that the ELM modes periodically become unstable and have breakouts. This creates a large energy flux in a short time, like that of a solar flare on the Sun, where hot plasma breaks free of the magnetic fields. When this occurs the plasma may touch the side walls of the tokamak and overheat the internal surfaces to many thousands of degrees. The side wall surfaces will be evaporated and eroded inside the plasma chamber. In this way the ELM modes result in the introduction of plasma impurities which contribute to raising the effective atomic number (the number of free protons per particle) of the plasma which results in greatly reduced fusion efficiency or even the halting of the fusion reaction entirely; the target is to keep the effective atomic number below two. The aggregate erosion is large and the lining of the tokamak walls may need be replaced often. In order to operate the machine continuously and cost effectively the ELM modes must be controlled. The control of ELM is paramount for a successful fusion tokamak. In the video below Alberto Loarte tells us a little more about the control of ELM modes and clever ways that the ELMs are dealt with.
The plasma instabilities inside a fusion reactor are a serious engineering challenge, but they are not a safety concern at all. Unlike a fission reactor, when a fusion reactor is compromised it does not go critical in a dangerous explosion (like a fission reactor would), instead it just fizzles out harmlessly. This technology is not perfect though because while some may claim that a fusion reactor would create no dangerous radioactive material in fact it would produce some radioactive material that would need to be handled. It is the walls of the reactor which will become slightly radioactive (through neutron activation). Conveniently though the half life of such radioactive waste materials is less than 100 years and could be entirely handled on site.
We should all be hoping for fusion. I spoke with Michel Claessens, the head of communications for ITER, and one of the questions I asked him was, what should the public know about fusion and ITER?
As much as possible. More seriously, I would be happy if people understood the differences between fission and fusion.
And he has a point I think. Most people simply don't understand what is at stake and what our options our. If you are reading this then you are already more informed than most. Tell people about the difference between fusion and fission and encourage your government (no matter what country you live in) to follow a wise energy policy. While I was writing this article the United States changed its funding proposition for ITER which was a welcome change because at one point the United States looked like it would falter on its commitment to fusion research and ITER completely. This is an investment in our future and the Earth. I asked Claessens a question about this topic too, how important is worldwide collaboration in achieving a successful ITER project?
Worldwide collaboration is useful and even necessary - to pool and ensure the best use of resources (human and financial). The ITER project is so complex that no single country has the scientific and technological skills to build the machine alone. In addition, the international collaboration was seen by ITER fathers (Gorbachev and Reagan) as a way out to cold war.
The idea of harnessing the power of the Sun on the Earth is so much more than just a scientific endeavor. It is a very human dream to hold the Sun (what culture does not have some kind of original creation story or explanation for the sun?) and it is possible that realizing this dream may bring us together for all of the right reasons.
It is a fact that I have written more fiction in my life than science writing and more science writing that I have scientific papers. When my advisor has asked me to write I am able to naturally come up with an abstract and an introduction like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I summarize the current state of the field neatly and present our results as the natural evolution of what comes next. Then when it comes to writing out the details of the research and the work I slow down. My advisor has a bit of criticism about the introduction (it is not specific enough they say), and plenty of criticism for the rest of the writing as if my entire style is not adequate. What is with the style of science writing in grants and research papers?
It as if scientists are bound to a certain kind of writing that is dry, concise (and it has to be when we have to pay per page published in most research journals), and standardized. I think many scientist would agree that our language doesn't have to be dry as long as it is standardized. Expository writing is different from other kinds of writing sure, but we have to ask ourselves how and why? Science writing for journalism is different than that of science writing for papers of grants even though they are both technically expository writing. I wonder if this is because they must be or because mediocre writing has become the style in science papers. Adam Ruben has written a wonderful opinion piece over at Science magazine mocking some of the quirks of scientific paper writing. The piece is worth a read and he includes a list of science paper tropes which are hilarious. Here is an excerpt:
1. Scientific papers must begin with an obligatory nod to their own relevance, usually by citing exaggerated figures about disease prevalence or other impending disasters. If your research does not actually address one of these issues, pretend it does, because hey, that didn’t stop you on the grant application. For example, you might write, “Twenty million children die of scabies every day. OMG we built a robot kangaroo!”
2. Using the first person in your writing humanizes your work. If possible, therefore, you should avoid using the first person in your writing. Science succeeds in spite of human beings, not because of us, so you want to make it look like your results magically discovered themselves.
3. Some journals, such as Science, officially eschew the passive voice. Others print only the passive voice. So find a healthy compromise by writing in semi-passive voice.
ACTIVE VOICE: We did this experiment.
PASSIVE VOICE: This experiment was done by us.
SEMI-PASSIVE VOICE: Done by us, this experiment was.
Yes, for the semi-passive voice, you’ll want to emulate Yoda. Yoda, you’ll want to emulate.
Cabinet Magazine has an interesting cultural perspective on human's attempts to zoom in and out of nature in the vertical. Particularly they focus on one of my favorite science films ever, Power of Ten.
Powers of Ten was originally inspired by a 1957 book by the Dutch educator Kees Boeke titled Cosmic View. By 1963, the Eameses were experimenting with tracking shots that gave the effect of a camera pulling away with accelerating motion from an object, and in 1968 used these in a film called A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Shot in black and white, it was followed by an extended color version—the one known as Powers of Ten—made in 1977. The basic set-up of the latter film is well-known. It opens with a picnic scene in a park in Chicago. From a ground level view, the camera then switches to a vertical, aerial position from which it looks down, the frame centered—as we later find out—on an atom in the man’s hand. At this point the narrator tells us that we are one meter away and looking at a square one meter by one meter. Now the camera pulls away vertically and begins to accelerate so that every ten seconds our distance from the initial scene is ten times greater. The camera continues its upward trajectory until just after 1024 meters (100 million light years) when it gradually slows and begins its descent, collapsing beyond its original position and now decelerating through the ever-smaller dimensions of cells, molecules, atoms, and beyond.
The present does not exist. All notions of the present are built upon the history of light. Patricio Guzmán's makes these surreal claims as he narrates in his documentary Nostalgia de la Luz (or Nostalgia for the Light) as he draws out the connections between astronomers and those searching for bones in Chile's Atacma Desert. Guzmán is obsessed with history and talented at drawing strange parallels in this compelling film. Chile under the rule of Pinochet in the '70s has a dark history of kidnapping, concentration camps, and mass murders of political dissidents. Chile also has clear dark skies which astronomers have fallen in love with.
I saw this film this evening and I was impressed. It takes one of the best parts of astronomy and projects it on to a real human conflict in a way that is scientifically tasteful and touching at once. There is a lot that could be said about the film and the director as well who was in exile from Chile in the '70s, but there is an easy way to summarize the film: the most profound questions about the Universe and human existence are the same. However, this summary doesn't do the film justice as it uses strong imagery to evoke what can't be said. I did not know that the half illuminated moon and a human skull looked so similar. In the end though you are left with the realization that those searching in Chile's deserts will not be able to change the past.
Check out this lovely art by Jeremy Geddes. He is a Melbourne artist who works with mostly oil paints. His paintings have glowing colors and he has this recurrent cosmonaut theme that vaguely makes them seem relevant. Below are three of my favorite images that I have seen: The White Cosmonaut, The Red Cosmonaut, and Heat Death. Of his cosmonaut series he himself is vague,
I wanted to construct my own reality through my paintings, a quiet melancholic space that operates by it’s own set of underlying rules and runs it’s own oblique narrative. With each successive painting, I try to build the world and uncover it’s form. The cosmonaut paintings are the first step in this.
And on his piece Heat Death he again lets your mind linger on meaning and reasoning,
Hopefully, I communicate everything I want to say through the painting itself. I’m not interested in giving it a didactic final meaning. I just want to spark questions in the viewer.
Artists have the luxury of letting their art speak so that they don't have to. Scientists don't have this luxury and generally must have a didactic (although, not intending to imply moral) explanation of nature; an explanation which may or may not be close to the truth. Science ultimately doesn't self explain its emphases on truth seeking. Truth is like art, sought for its own sake. Oh and please, if someone wants to buy me the Red/White Cosmonaut diptych print feel free.
I enjoy very much the intersection of classical music and physics (for example see my posts on the phenomena of lightning and on Quantifying Goethe) so if I was in the UK I would definitely be checking out the ongoing performance lecture about the legacy of Albert Einstein the scientist, the man, and the musician. Music was an important part of Einstein's life and his passion for music is what has inspired me to continue to learn the Viola after a fifteen year hiatus. The show is called Einstein's Universe and it is put on by particle physicist Brian Foster and British musician Jack Liebeck. The lecture tour will be a fusion of science communication and classical music. You can read a bit more about the show over at Physics World here and see a video about it below.
You can catch a Foster and Liebeck perform an arrangement of the Mozart violin sonata in C Major k.296 here.
Today, a philosophical diversion on the evolution of religion. Specifically I was thinking about the metaphorical evolution of religion and the Darwinian evolution of the human mind with a predisposition to the mystical. I was reminded about this topic and a Science article from some time ago when I saw a review for The Evolution of God a new book by Robert Right. My thesis on the topic is that as long as religion infers a survival advantage upon a group then evolution will select individuals whose minds are wired to be religious; or as society changes rapidly religion itself will evolve in a cultural respect. In this recent NYRB article Can Science Explain Religion? Allen Orr reviews Right's book with positive and critical remarks, an excerpt:
In The Evolution of God, he [Right] both surveys the history of religion and, more important, offers a new theory to explain why this history unfolded as it did.
According to Wright's theory, although religion may seem otherworldly—a realm of revelation and spirituality—its history has, like that of much else, been driven by mundane "facts on the ground." Religion, that is, changes through time primarily because it responds to changing circumstances in the real world: economics, politics, and war. Wright thus offers what he emphasizes is a materialist account of religion. As he further emphasizes, the ways in which religion responds to the world make sense. Like organisms, religions respond adaptively to the world.
More formally, Wright argues that religious responses to reality are generally explained by game theory and evolutionary psychology, the subjects of his previous books. Subtle aspects of the human mind, he claims, were shaped by Darwinian natural selection to allow us to recognize and take advantage of certain social situations. The most important of these—and the centerpiece of Wright's theory—are what game theorists call non-zero-sum interactions. Unlike zero-sum games, wherein one player's gain is another player's loss, in some games both players can win; hence "non-zero-sum." The classic example is economic trade. In a free market, trade occurs when both parties benefit from exchange (otherwise they wouldn't engage in it).
Again, this theory doesn't seem new at all. It is, to my perspective, obvious that religion co-evolved with early humans precisely because religious tendencies in a society inferred an evolutionary advantage upon the group. Wright's basic theory is that due to historical circumstance the optimal strategy suggested by game theory has moved religion towards tolerance and conciliation. Religion changed its fundamental tenants throughout history in order that it would continue to instill advantages on its society. So, then this leads to the question, does religion and the church as an institution encourage prosociality or is it a self-serving system?
The Good Samaritan [painting by Jacopo Bassano, d. 1592, copyright 2006, The National Gallery, London]
Modern society has developed into a complex system in which people must work together. A cynical perspective is that people work together only in exchange for money or services with the ultimate goal of only helping themselves. There is nothing altruistic about the interactions. Yet, altruism is rampant. Another person helping another person with no aim other than to help can be described as a prosocial act. Prosociallity is defined as the quality of being beneficial to all parties and consistent with community laws and norms. Psychologists and evolutionary psychologists are seeking the answers as to why people engage in prosocial behavior, even at a cost to themselves in certain cases. Norenzayan and Shariff explain the issue in The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality (Science 2008, a link to the article on the Science website is here. The Science link to the article will not be available to those who do not have a Science subscription. You would expect that an article about prosociality would be available to all in line with its prosocial topic, but that's situational irony for you. The direct link to the PDF posted above was from the author's web page and it may not be stable). The article abstract:
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.
The authors run various experiments to determine in what situations people exhibit prosocial behavior. For example they ask when the average person would stop to help someone fallen on the sidewalk. Would a religious individual be more inclined to help that same fallen person, just as in the bible parable the good Samaritan? In the authors own words:
In several behavioral studies, researchers failed to find any reliable association between religiosity and prosocial tendencies. In the classic “Good Samaritan” experiment (22), for example, researchers staged an anonymous situation modeled after the Biblical parable—a man was lying on a sidewalk appearing to be sick and in need of assistance (Fig. 1, image above). Participants varying in religiousness were led to pass by this victim (actually a research confederate) on their way to complete their participation in a study. Unobtrusively recorded offers of help showed no relation with religiosity in this anonymous context (22). Only a situational variable whether participants were told to rush or take their time—produced differences in helping rates. Other behavioral studies, however, have found reliable associations between religiosity and prosociality, but under limited conditions. In one study (23), researchers compared levels of cooperation and coordination between secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. In this economic game, two members of the same kibbutz who remained anonymous to each other were given access to an envelope with a certain amount of money. Each participant simultaneously decided how much money to withdraw from the envelope and keep. Players only kept the money they requested if the sum of the requests did not exceed the total amount in the envelope. If it did, the players received nothing. The results showed that, controlling for relevant predictors, systematically less money was withdrawn in the religious kibbutzim than in the secular ones (23).
In the conclusion the authors of this study on prosicoalty find evidence that prosociality is a bounded phenomenon. It more likely to be exhibited in situations where it helps in maintaining a favorable social reputation within the ingroup. It seems that evolution has enforced this self-serving ingroup behavior in some cases and evolution has also enforced purely altruistic behavior in other cases. The human mind certainly doesn't evolve on human time scales so it is up to religious groups to evolve their beliefs. Hopefully religious groups can continue to move towards tolerance, but in the meanwhile atheists will wonder why we need religion to move forward at all.
References:
Norenzayan A, & Shariff AF (2008). The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322 (5898), 58-62 PMID: 18832637
This is not a documentary about the politics, fraud, or current events in Iran. This is a documentary about people in Iran. I watched this several years ago I want to share it because I believe understanding the people of Iran is better than interfering with the people of Iran.
Comets have long been portents of change. They challenge the rote repetition of our skies. An astute observer of the sky will perhaps have recently noticed a new object in the sky, a comet, present for the last few weeks (you would have had to look east just before sunrise near the star Spica). This was the comet ISON. But comet ISON, having strayed too close to the Sun, has been mostly annihilated. If there is a comet in the sky and no one sees it, was it ever really there?
