tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198916038708935182024-03-14T02:43:22.300-04:00digressionsA running commentaryJack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-55354016370968672542014-09-02T10:38:00.003-04:002014-09-02T10:38:24.976-04:00What Lies Beneath: Loricifera <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">So in the course of procrastinating last night (if only I could get paid to do it, although probably some people would think that's exactly what I get paid to do) I ran across something interesting. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">You can basically divide all life on Earth into two groups: the eukaryotes, and everything else (which includes, mostly, bacteria and the archaea.) Eukaryotes include anything --single or multi-cel</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">led --with a membrane-bound central nucleus ("eukaryote" is from a Greek root, meaning, roughly, "good kernel.")<br /><br />Virtually all eukaryotes --humans, animals, plants, fungi, many protozoans, and so on --also contain in their cells, tiny organelles called mitochondria; mitochondria are, essentially, cells-within-a-cell that allow the use of oxygen for the production of energy. (ADP+P-->oxidative phosphorylation-->ATP anybody?) Mitochondria actually existed as free-living organisms at one time; around 2 billion years ago, a bigger cell tried to eat one. The proto-mitochondrion, however, resisted digestion, and became an endosymbiont --its energy producing capabilities traded off to the host cell in exchange for a supply of glucose and, one presumes, some measure of protection from harm.<br /><br />The other major endosymbiont in eukaryotic organisms is of course the chloroplast, which is found in plants, algae, and even in some unicellular eukaryotes. The chloroplast uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to generate energy and make food (glucose.) An interesting thing about chloroplasts is that there has been an example of the beginnings of an endosymbiotic relationship between chloroplasts and a host cell fairly recently, in evolutionary terms --Paulinella, a photosynthetic amoeba, appears to have, at some point, ingested another photosynthetic microorganism and, apparently knowing a good thing when it saw it, decide to hang on to the chloroplasts.<br /><br />For the longest time (since high school biology, basically) I was under the impression that was it: the only endosymbionts used in energy production were chloroplasts and mitochondria. As it turns out, however, there is another: the hydrogenosome. Hydrogenosomes, like mitochondria and chloroplasts, appear to be the result of endosymbiosis, and they require no oxygen. Until recently, they were thought to exist only in protozoa (they're the main energy producing organelle in Trichomona vaginalis and Plasmodium falciparum, the latter being the parasite responsible for most deaths due to malaria.)<br /><br />However, in 2010, scientists investigating the depths of Mediterranean found the first known multicellular organism using hydrogenosomes --which is also the first multicellular animal known that spends its entire life in an oxygen-free environment. The critter in question is Loricifera --there are three species currently known to exist, and they're rather appealing looking, with fronds extending from a protective shell (albeit they're tiny, the biggest run to about a millimeter: giants among their kind.) The ones discovered live in a huge pool of ultra-salty water deep below the surface, at around 3000 meters, in the L'Atalante basin --the boundary between salt and fresh water, or halocline, prohibits mixing of salt and fresh water, so below the halocline the water is totally oxygen free.<br /><br />Apparently they eluded detection for so long thanks to their rarity, and the extremely firm grip they keep on the bottom gravel.</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span><br />
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Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-84535851907788762212014-09-02T10:36:00.000-04:002014-09-02T19:43:09.099-04:00Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser: Spooky Action At A Distance In Time And Space?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The physicist Richard Feynman once said, approximately, that all of quantum physics could be understood if you understood the double-slit experiment and thought through its consequences carefully. (This is obviously in spirit, if not in reality, something of a follow-up to the LHC visit article Part III which has yet to be written.) The double slit experiment is important because it is the experimental evidence of something often talked about but poorly understood: so-called wave-particle duality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was thought by Newton that light was "corpuscular" in nature; he thought it must be made up of particles. Later it was found that if you take a beam of light, and shine it through two tall, narrow, adjacent slits, you get an interference pattern --this can only happen if light is a wave of some sort. Even later, the photoelectric effect seemed to show the contrary: that light was indeed corpuscular in nature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The funny thing is this: take a beam of light or some other suitably quantum-sized particle, like an electron. Fire it through one slit: you will see a simple blurred outline, roughly in the shape of the slit: a diffraction pattern, due to the scattering of the light waves. Fire it through two slits, and you will see an interference pattern: alternating light and dark bands, which can be interpreted as reinforcing and cancelling wave-fronts. It would seem the case is closed: light is wave-like in nature --but the case is more complicated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As it happens, if you are using a beam of light and you have good equipment, you can turn the intensity of the beam down until only one photon is being emitted at a time. You will see, on your detector, only one "hit" at a time, at a specific location. Yet, if you let the "hits" build up over time, they will eventually form an interference pattern --as if, somehow, the particle had passed through both slits at once and was somehow interfering with itself. And this is a very funny thing. (Here we clearly intend, "funny" to mean "intensely intuitively frustrating; Einstein, and Schrödinger and quite a lot of other physicists, philosophers, and simple well-intentioned layman have found it anything but funny. It led to one of the best quotes in the history science, which was Schrödinger's remark about the famous equation that bears his name, and describes the wave-function of a quantum system: "I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.")</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now all this is already trying enough: we are unable to understand intuitively what this means, because at the physical scales our five senses can operate within we are not familiar with any such behavior. The problem, naturally, has gotten even worse as quantum mechanics has evolved. Einstein postulated that if you put a detector at each of the two slits, this would reveal which of the slits through which the particle had passed. If this is the case, then the particle should, so to speak, no longer be able to pass through both slits at once --in technical terms you may say the superposition of states (slot A and slot B) has collapsed into a single discrete value. It was not technically possible to do such experiments until the 1970s but it indeed proved true.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, suppose you were to somehow mark the particle so you could tell <i>after </i>it had passed through the slit, which one it had passed through. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As it turns out, when you do this, what you expect would happen, does. If you know through which slit the particle passes, then the interference pattern disappears. But suppose you could somehow erase the mark, so to speak, after the particle passed through the slit? If we follow through the logic of the experiment, then "erasing" this quantum information should cause the interference pattern to re-appear.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The manner in which the notion has been put to the test experimentally is extremely interesting. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Take a photon source: a laser will do nicely. Let the photons pass through two slits. Then let the photons pass through a special prism that splits each photon into two photons. As each pair came from a single parent they are said to be <i>entangled --</i>as with most common-sensible sounding terms in quantum mechanics this has a precise mathematical formulation which need not concern us here. It broad terms, it means that the two "child" photons cannot be thought of as completely separate quantum systems: they must be described as parts of a larger quantum system. In practical terms this means that if you measure some aspect of one "child" you will know the complementary aspect of the other without having to take a measurement of it directly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Having started with one stream of photons, you passed them through the two slits, yielding two sets of photons. Having passed each stream subsequently through a producer of entangled pairs, you now have four "children." One of each set of twins is referred to technically as the "signal" photon, and the other is referred to as the "idler."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now if you know through which slit the signal photons have passed, you should not see any interference pattern with the signal photons. If you do not, they should create an interference pattern. Here is the important part. You arrange the pathways of the "idler" photons so that they arrive at one of four detectors. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At two of these detectors, you can tell through which slit the parent of the idler photon passed. If you compare the idler photons from these detectors with the signal photons, then an interference pattern emerges. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Oddly enough, however, if you compare the signal photons with the other two detectors --at which you <i>cannot </i>tell through which slit the parent of the idler photon passed --then the interference pattern disappears. You have "erased" that information.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The truly peculiar thing about this, is that you can set up your idler photon pathway so that it takes <i>longer </i>for the idler photons to get to the detectors than it does for the signal photons --the usual interval is 8 nanoseconds but in principle it could be as long as you like --billions of years, even. The results would still be the same --which seems to imply that <i>the idler photons are sending information backwards in time. </i>This worried a lot of people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As it turns out, however, there is a catch: you can only observe an interference pattern for the <i>subset of photons which you compare to the idler particles that have arrived at the detectors that erase their origin. </i>If you look at the whole set of signal photon detections, they do not form an interference pattern taken alone. This does something very happy: it saves causality. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The information contained in this statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief.</span></i><br />
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Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-50984055758684465132013-08-24T11:38:00.001-04:002013-08-25T18:14:03.935-04:00Interlude, Or, Not Part 3 Of A Visit To The LHC, Or, Thoughts On Tête de Veau<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It's not the promised update --which, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, is coming --but rather a little meditation on something else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; line-height: 18px;">Today's New York Times magazine has a short piece on the history of, and various forms taken by, the picnic ("an early mention can be traced to a 1649 satirical French poem, which features the Frères Pique-nicques, known for visiting friend</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">s 'armed with bottles and dishes.'") There is a mention also of a dish recommended for picnicking by Mrs. Beeton in her classic <i>Book of Household Management </i>from 1861 for something called a "collared calf's head." Morbidly fascinated, I searched for the recipe and found this, at celtnet.org:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">"INGREDIENTS.—A calf's head, 4 tablespoonfuls of minced parsley, 4 blades of pounded mace, 1/2 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, white pepper to taste, a few thick slices of ham, the yolks of 6 eggs boiled hard. Mode.—Scald the head for a few minutes; take it out of the water, and with a blunt knife scrape off all the hair. Clean it nicely, divide the head and remove the brains. Boil it tender enough to take out the bones, which will be in about 2 hours. When the head is boned, flatten it on the table, sprinkle over it a thick layer of parsley, then a layer of ham, and then the yolks of the eggs cut into thin rings and put a seasoning of pounded mace, nutmeg, and white pepper between each layer; roll the head up in a cloth, and tie it up as tightly as possible. Boil it for 4 hours, and when it is taken out of the pot, place a heavy weight on the top, the same as for other collars. Let it remain till cold; then remove the cloth and binding, and it will be ready to serve. Time.—Altogether 6 hours. Average cost, 5s. to 7s. each. Seasonable from March to October."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">I notice this is in broad strokes essentially the same as the notorious (or maybe infamous) French dish known as tête de veau. I have never seen tête de veau on the menu of any American restaurant (and I don't expect to --Americans pay a lot of lip service to nose-to-tail dining but when push comes to shove I've noticed most of us still recoil from innards.) The collared calf's head flavorings bear a family resemblance to the famous <i>sauce gribiche</i>, which is the traditional accompaniment to a tête de veau, and which is based on egg, vinegar, capers, and parsley --really, a gussied-up <i>sauce vinaigrette</i>, which also gives it a passing relationship to chimichurri sauce, I suppose, but that's another post. In any case, one of the best discussions of tête de veau (in English, anyway) is of course in M. F. K. Fisher, who said in <i>How To Cook A Wolf</i> (1941) that " . . . I have lived about three-fourths of my life in the United States and I have <i>never </i>been served anything even faintly suggestive of the undisguisable anatomy of a boiled calf's head, in this my homeland."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">In fact, she writes so well on the subject of tête de veau that I think I will quote her further.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">"I must admit that my own first introduction to tête de veau was a difficult one for a naive American girl. The main trouble, perhaps, was that it was not a veal's head at all, but half a veal's head. There was the half-tongue, lolling stiffly from the neat half-mouth. There was the one eye, closed in a savory wink. There was the one ear, lopped loose and faintly pink over the odd wrinkles of the demi-forehead. And there, by the single pallid nostril, were three stiff white hairs." (I notice now, which I have never before, despite having read this passage more or less regularly since I first found the book in my mother's kitchen at the age of ten, the incantatory use of "stiff.")</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">My own introduction to, and so far only encounter, with tête de veau was at a restaurant in Paris on my 50th birthday, which I supposed was as good a time to eat someone's head as any, and it was preceded by an excellent dish of sea urchins and a great deal of wine, so by the time the tête de veau arrived I was in a beamingly uncaring and open-minded mood. As it happened my tête de veau was served off the bone, and was deliciously gelatinous --the brains, however, perhaps in a nod to the "undisguisable anatomy" of what I can only assume is the more classical presentation, were served separately in all their convoluted glory. I believe, although wine and time have somewhat blurred the memory, that the brains were served with a fish fork and knife, and that most mysterious of culinary implements, the </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><i>cuillère à sauce individuelle</i>, or sauce spoon, the correct use of which I've never been able to divine. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">The thing about eating the head of an animal is that it's impossible to deny the identity between you and the creature you are consuming --there is a whiff of timor mortis there that's not present in a chop or a steak. The head of an animal is a tombstone that says, As I Am Now, So Shall You Be, and eating it is both an act of self-sustenance, and an act of resignation.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;">Probably the most coy recipe in the world for tête de veau (or at least, the coyest I have ever read) is one that cannot be recommended for its hewing to tradition as it omits the <i>sauce gribiche</i>. It does, however, more than make up for it by being the only one I have ever read (and I assume the only one in the world) that recommends swearing an oath over Milton's <i>Defensio pro Populo Anglicano</i> before devouring the dish.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://kulchermulcher.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/a-recipe-for-tete-de-veau/" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://kulchermulcher.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/a-recipe-for-tete-de-veau/</a></span><br /><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; line-height: 18px;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Coda: My host for the evening I first ate </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;">tête de veau reminds me that it was at Le Violon d'Ingres which I believe at one point had a Michelin star, not that it really matters. I note in <a href="http://www.maisonconstant.com/violon-ingres/en/" target="_blank">perusing the menu</a> that their </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;">tête de veau is indeed as I recall --something of a deconstructed affair, with the tongue and brains served separately. Also I note that rather than a <i>sauce gribiche</i>, the restaurant prefers a <i>sauce ravigote</i> which is essentially identical to a sauce gribiche but omits the egg, which means that it will break more easily as the albumins in the egg white are not present to emulsify the oil and vinegar. I'm reluctant to say this as I've run across at least once recipe for a sauce ravigote which <i>does </i>use eggs and seems indistinguishable from a sauce gribiche. Anyhow, I would certainly happily recommend Le Violon d'Ingres to anyone looking for a wonderful </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #37404e; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">tête de veau in the 7th Arrondissement or for that matter anywhere in Paris. Owned by the famous Christian Constant and at least as of November the Twenty First Two Thousand and Twelve Anno Domini, a rather nice place to consume the partitioned head of a young veal with sauce wossname.</span></span></span><br />
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Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-58899671793252757132013-07-28T13:12:00.003-04:002013-07-28T19:17:24.312-04:00One Ring To Rule Them All: A Visit To The Large Hadron Collider (Part 2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><b>If you want to you can read <a href="http://digressions-jack.blogspot.com/2013/07/one-ring-to-rule-them-all-visit-to.html" target="_blank">Part 1 first.</a> I thought this was going to be shorter but the tale grows in the telling. The best part is that it's all true.</b></i><br />
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To get to the LHC, we had to go to France --well, strictly speaking, the Collider was already practically under our feet even in Meyrin. You can see a part of it --one of the factory-sized surface points --from the Geneva airport, as a matter of fact; if you're landing or taking off, and you happen to be in a window seat looking north, you can see a cluster of buildings with what look like miniature nuclear power plant cooling towers on the roof, just past a parking area for small planes. Our visit was to one of the main research facilities located on the LHC ring --the CMS Detector, which is in Cessy, France, just across the border. (Crossing from Switzerland to France is, for an American used to hours-long waits and exhausted, suspicious immigration agents to get back into the US at JFK, almost comically low-key --no passports asked for or shown, and I don't particularly remember even stopping. We may have slowed down a bit.)<br />
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The 27 kilometers-in-circumference main accelerator ring of the LHC straddles the border between Switzerland and France, just to the north of the city of Geneva itself. The giant ring is buried under the earth at depths which vary depending on the surface geography; the collider tunnel is anywhere from 50 to 175 meters underground (greatest depths are under the Jura mountains, shallowest are near Lac Leman/Lake Geneva.) There are several reasons for its subterranean location; cost of surface real estate is one, and shielding from cosmic radiation is another. The tunnel containing the main ring once housed another particle accelerator: LEP, or the Large Electron Positron Collider, which was decommissioned in the year 2000 to make way for the LHC.<br />
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Getting packets of protons up to as close to the speed of light as possible isn't easy and while the largest ring is the most attention-getting part of the entire complex, it's actually the final stage in a four-step process involving a complex of equipment, some parts of which are more than half a century old. The ladies and gentlemen at CERN get their protons by stripping off the electrons from hydrogen atoms --the excellent animated film showing the process on CERN's website depicts a rather banal bottle of hydrogen gas. (Hydrogen, the simplest chemical element, consists of exactly one proton with one lonely electron orbiting it.) This happens in the injection chamber of LINAC 2, the linear accelerator that's the first stage in getting fast-moving particles into the LHC itself. With the electrons gone, all that's left are single protons --these have a positive charge, and so, can be accelerated by electrical fields and contained by electromagnets.<br />
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Protons leave LINAC 2 are already moving fast --about 1/3 the speed of light (<i>c.</i>) From LINAC 2 the protons go into the PSB (Proton Synchrotron Booster) where they're divided into four packets and pumped up to even higher speeds --91.6% <i>c. </i>Powerful electromagnets keep the protons on a circular path while they gain speed. The third stage is the even larger Proton Synchrotron. <br />
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The circular Proton Synchrotron is old --it was first used in November of 1959, and was briefly the world's most powerful particle accelerator. Today its main purpose is to help feed high speed particles into the main ring of the LHC --and it's been upgraded over the decades so that its beam is now a thousand times more powerful than its original design. At 628 meters, it's a massive piece of equipment. The protons injected into the PS only stay there for about 1.2 seconds, but during that time, they go to 99.9% <i>c. </i><br />
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This close to the speed of light, Einstein's theory of relativity starts to make itself felt in a big way. One of the main insights from relativity theory is that things look different depending on your frame of reference, or where you're looking at things from (hence the name --it's all relative.) To us, stationary observers with respect to the protons, the increase in speed means an increase in energy --as the protons go faster, they gain mass. (This is a weird effect to someone who has never heard of relativistic effects before, but I don't make the news, I just report it.) The speed limit for the universe is the speed of light itself --nothing can go faster; particles with mass can get close but never reach this velocity. At <i>c, </i>a particle would have infinite mass, which is Not Allowed. (Photons, which have no mass, do travel at the speed of light --well, they <i>are </i>light, so they would, wouldn't they.)<br />
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As they leave PS, the protons have about 25 times their rest mass, and this close to the speed of light, any further addition of energy results in a lot of increase in mass and very little in velocity.<br />
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There's one more stage before the protons can enter the main ring, though. From the Proton Synchrotron, they go into the Super Proton Synchrotron (CERN is running out of superlatives, obviously. May I suggest as the next obvious bit of nomenclature the I Can't Believe It's A Synchrotron synchrotron.) SPS is stage four, the last before the LHC proper. SPS has been flinging particles around since 1976 (in 1983, it was used for the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the W and Z bosons, which are the gauge bosons for the weak force --one of the four fundamental forces.) Yet more energy is added to the protons here --and while there is not much gain in velocity, there is a lot of mass added (remember, mass-energy equivalence: E=MC^2.) The unit used for mass-energy is the electron volt, and while protons leaving LINAC 2 --stage one --have an energy of 50 MeV (fifty million electron volts) by the time the protons are fired from SPS into the main ring, they've reached a mass of 450 GeV (giga --billion --electron volts.) <br />
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Finally, the protons are ready for prime time: the Large Hadron Collider itself. When the Collider is in operation, it takes about a half hour for SPS to fill it with 2,808 individual "packets" of protons. The packets are pumped with yet more energy in the LHC. The LHC actually consists of two tunnels, --in one, protons go around clockwise, and in the other, counterclockwise. The beams cross at four points spaced around the ring --these are the giant detector caverns, and when particles collide at high energy and produce a burst of energy and fundamental particles, it's these detectors that gather information about the event --evidence that the scientists at CERN, and around the world, sift through in hopes of finding, among other things, traces of the Higgs boson.<br />
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The protons in the LHC main ring are brought up to 99.9999991% <i>c --</i>they're moving so quickly that they're only traveling about three meters per second slower than light. At these speeds they go around the ring 11,000 times in one second and the energy necessary to accelerate and contain them is greater than that used by the entire neighboring state of Geneva. To generate the immense magnetic fields necessary to contain the proton beams, massive superconducting magnets are used --some as heavy as 27 tons. <br />
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If you like electromagnets (and hey, who doesn't) you'll love these. Electromagnets work by generating a magnetic field when current flows through them, and it takes a lot of current to make magnetic fields strong enough to contain the proton beams, which are powerful enough melt a half a ton of copper. The proton beam wouldn't make a bad weapon, if you could aim it --it's so powerful a special "beam dump" chamber had to be constructed to give the proton beam someplace safe to go. The beam, in case of a superconductor failure, has to be dissipated in about 90 milliseconds, which is equal to about 4 TW (terawatts, or trillions of watts.) The beam dump cavern contains a target of graphite composite eight meters long and a meter in diameter, and it's surrounded by a thousand tons of concrete radiation shielding. <br />
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So much current is used that it would melt the magnets if they weren't cooled to near absolute zero by liquid helium, which makes them <i>superconductors --</i>in a superconductor, current flows without resistance, but most known superconductors only become superconductors at very low temperatures. The LHC's superconducting magnets are kept at a temperature colder than interstellar space --1.9 K, or about -271.25 degrees Celsius (absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, is 273.15 degrees Celsius.) It takes 96 tons of liquid helium to maintain the magnets at the right temperature --which means the LHC is both the largest particle accelerator in the world <i>and </i>the world's biggest refrigerator.<br />
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It may now be occurring to the reader that this much energy comes with some inherent dangers, and indeed, something going wrong with the LHC would be bad. In September of 2008, something <i>did </i>go wrong. The LHC was being powered up for the first time, but an electrical short occurred between two superconducting magnets. The result was one of the worst things that can happen to a superconductor: a so-called "quench," or accidental loss of superconductivity. Temperatures almost instantly skyrocketed as the sudden electrical resistance produced a tremendous heat spike, this caused vaporization of liquid helium along a considerable stretch of the ring tunnel. Automated emergency shutdown occurred but the damage was horrendous, even at far lower than maximum power --the liquid helium had vented with enough force to rupture the proton tunnels, contaminating them with soot, and rip multi-ton magnets off their concrete bases. The amount of liquid helium released was so large --several tons --that it was two weeks before repair teams could enter the affected section of the ring to evaluate the damage (it was, one scientist commented drily, "not a pretty sight.")<br />
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The LHC had its share of teething problems, some of them almost comical --in one instance, in November of 2009, another quench incident almost occurred when power was lost due to a short in an electrical substation on the surface. The reason was about as French as causes of superconductor failure come --a passing bird bearing a chunk of baguette in its beak had apparently dropped a piece of the world's most famous bread into a transformer. This somewhat risible incident fortunately didn't cause any damage --a controlled shutdown prevented another quench incident --but the number of setbacks led to some interesting speculation about the nature of the Higgs boson.<br />
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In particular, several scientists speculated that there is a form of cosmic censorship preventing the Higgs boson from being observed. Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, suggested that "reverse chronological causation" was behind the accidents at the LHC --in essence, the Large Hadron Collider was traveling <i>backwards in time from the future to prevent itself from working. </i>Said Nielsen, in an email to the New York Times, "It is our prediction that all Higgs-creating machines will have bad luck." <br />
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If correct, the hypothesis would have gone a long way towards explaining why the US cut funding for its own home-grown mega-atom-smasher, the Superconducting Supercollider, which would have been 87 kilometers in circumference and had three times the power of the LHC (naturally, it would have been located in Texas.) The SSC was canceled in 1993. The apparent success of the LHC in finding evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson has pretty much put this somewhat bizarre theory to rest, but as the Times pointed out in its coverage, subatomic physics is not exactly a field where intuitively sensible behavior of physical systems is expected --Niels Bohr once famously said, to a colleague, "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough to be correct."<br />
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Speaking of crazy, there were some somewhat fringe worries that the LHC would do something at least as spectacular as commit temporal suicide --some people were worried that it would cause the end of the world. The two favorite apocalyptic scenarios involved the accidental creation of a miniature black hole or the accidental creation of a type of exotic matter particle known as a strangelet. Without going too much into technical details (OK, if you must, it's a mixture of up, down, and strange quarks) the problem with strange matter is that it may be more stable than normal matter --the concern is that strange matter may thus be contagious; any ordinary matter it comes into contact with would be turned into strange matter, like ice turning into <i>ice-nine </i>in Kurt Vonnegut's <i>Cat's Cradle. </i>This has obviously not happened. <br />
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Black holes are what you get when an especially massive star burns out its fuel and can no longer prevent itself from collapsing under its own weight. It collapses so powerfully that it becomes a singularity --a point object of infinite density, with a gravitational field so enormous that nothing can escape (well, nothing that gets closer than the black hole's event horizon.) The possibility that such a thing could form in one of the collision caverns at LHC, and devour the Earth by sucking you and all you know and love into the maw of a singularity, naturally drew a lot of attention (the <i>Daily Mail </i>produced a representative headline of the tabloid press coverage: "Are We All Going To Die Next Wednesday?")<br />
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As it turns out this is not a problem either, for various reasons --one of them is that black holes do lose mass and eventually evaporate through a rather complicated process known as Hawking radiation, and any microscopic black hole would simply evaporate before it has a chance to do any damage. A working group set up examine the problem pointed out that cosmic ray collisions in the Earth's upper atmosphere are more energetic than anything the LHC could produce and that if such events <i>could </i>cause the apocalypse it would have happened by now. Probably the most trenchant rebuttal to those who insisted that firing up the LHC would lead to the end of the world came from physicist Brian Greene, who said to <i>The New York Times, "</i>If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the Earth is devoured? It's a reasonable question with a definite answer: no."<br />
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All this was running through my head earlier this month on the car ride to the CMS detector --our car left the industrial environs of Meyrin and the Geneva airport behind, crossed into France, and then we found ourselves winding through the French countryside. Then, we turned up an unprepossessing driveway and found ourselves outside a tall hurricane fence topped with barbed wire. An affable security guard waved us through, and we saw an enormous complex of buildings --surface evidence that deep below, humanity was going through Nature's pockets for loose bosons.</div>
Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-83247315669991455532013-07-27T11:21:00.000-04:002013-07-29T10:20:47.560-04:00One Ring To Rule Them All: A Visit To The Large Hadron Collider (Part 1.)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I noticed in telling people about visiting the Large Hadron Collider that a surprising number of folks have never heard of it. In brief, it's the world's largest and most powerful "atom smasher" --a giant ring 27 kilometers in circumference, buried under hundreds of feet of rock, straddling the Swiss-French border. It was built to probe the fine structure of matter and space-time, by accelerating tiny bits of matter up to very close to the speed of light and then smashing them together (some people say it's rather like throwing a watch against a wall and watching the bits fly out to see how it works, which is not an exact analogy but it gives you the basic idea.)</span></b></i></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> If you know that all the matter you see around you is made of atoms, which are in turn made of smaller particles --protons, neutrons, and electrons --and that these particles interact with each other and with fields like the electromagnetic field, you know enough to go on with.</span></b></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"You don't have anything on your calendar for the first day you're in Geneva," the PR rmanager's email said. "Anything you'd like to do?" "Well," I wrote back, "I've always wanted to visit the Large Hadron Collider." I meant it as a joke but apparently, she took me seriously. The visit to the LHC and CERN took place not on my first day there, which was just as well --I had for some reason (and I don't know why, JFK--GVA is a flight I've made more times than I can count, in the line of duty) absolutely crippling jet lag and my first day I couldn't do much more than lie on the bed in my room at La Reserve, feeling bone-crushingly tired and wishing I could sleep, which I couldn't. It was no fault of the hotel's --La Reserve is located in the Swiss countryside on the shore of Lac Leman, just outside Geneva; it's one of the most relaxing hotels in Europe but I couldn't nod off for the life of me. Two glasses of wine with dinner didn't do anything but wake me up, and though I'd brought some melatonin with me I decided --rather foolishly --to white-knuckle it through the night. Melatonin works as far as sedation goes but it also has been increasingly giving me very, very unpleasant dreams and I've been trying to avoid it, though in retrospect I probably should have just knocked myself out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next day started early --my hosts on this trip to Geneva were from a small-batch watch company called Roger Dubuis, which makes a few thousand watches per year for the luxury market in a state-of-the-art facility in Meyrin, which is a suburb of Geneva. Geneva is both a city and a Canton; Meyrin is located in the Canton of Geneva, which makes the watches made by the company eligible for the prestigious Geneva Hallmark. This is a quality standard granted by the Canton for watches made to a certain level of quality specified by the Geneva Seal criteria. It's expensive to adhere to the requirements --the cost over making a standard movement is around thirty to forty per cent --but it's one of the company's main selling points; they remain the only company whose production is one hundred per cent Geneva Seal approved. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd long since forgotten that I'd mentioned the LHC to the company's PR manager in New York as I didn't honestly think that touring the LHC was possible, and I hadn't noticed that on my schedule for the day there were 2 hours set aside for "transport to a surprise destination," which I assumed was an off-site facility of some sort --an engraver, an enamelist's studio, a dial factory. As it turned out, the surprise destination was indeed the Large Hadron Collider.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The LHC is located at the headquarters of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire,or CERN, which was established in 1957 with 12 member states and now has 20. CERN's purpose was and is to conduct high energy particle physics experiments, and the Large Hadron Collider is the latest and most powerful particle accelerator --an atom smasher, in popular parlance --in CERN's arsenal. Basically, particle accelerators like the LHC accelerate subatomic particles up to very high speeds --the LHC takes packets of protons up to very close to the speed of light --and smashes them together in order to explore how matter and the structure of space-time as we observe them today, came into existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you observe the Universe today, you can see that it's expanding (this was an unpleasant surprise for Einstein, who favored a static model) and if you run the clock backwards, the Universe gets progressively smaller and denser and hotter. At time=zero, theory predicts that the very early universe experienced a phenomenon known as the Big Bang, which began as a moment in time when all the matter and energy in the Universe was concentrated in an extremely tiny area --a dimensionless point of infinite energy and density, or <i>singularity. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The earliest period of the history of the Universe is known as the Planck epoch, after the physicist Max Planck, and lasted for a very short period of time, known as the Planck Time --this is the amount of time it takes for light to travel the Planck Length, which is an extremely short distance; about 1.616 x 10 to the minus 35th power meters. It's impossible to have an intuitive sense for how tiny such a distance is (the <a href="http://scaleofuniverse.com/" target="_blank">Scale of the Universe</a> animation is pretty good though) but it helps to note that it is about 10 to the minus 20th power smaller than the diameter of a proton. Evidence for the Big Bang is robust --the left-over radiation from the Big Bang has been detected and mapped by deep space microwave radiation telescopes on satellites like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe" target="_blank">WMAP probe</a> --and though the Big Bang theory is widely accepted, it raises, to put it mildly, a lot of questions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most people would like to know where all the matter and energy (we should just say mass-energy, as by Einstein's equation, E=MC^2, we know they are equivalent) came from, which is a highly speculative subject in cosmology. Part of the problem is that we do not, at present, have the theoretical tools necessary to make mathematically reliable predictions about the earliest stage of the Big Bang, much less answer questions about where all the stuff that became all the stuff we see now came from. We can reliably date the age of the Universe to a little over thirteen billion years, but the problem with understanding the very early universe is that during the Planck Epoch, the energy density of the universe was so high that the fundamental forces --the electromagnetic force, weak force, strong force, and gravity --are thought to have been unified into a single force. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gravity is the odd man out; we have an excellent theory for gravitation --general relativity --and an excellent theory for subatomic particle behavior --quantum mechanics. However, when you try to make relativity and quantum mechanics play nice together, terrible things happen --the equations begin to generate ridiculous infinities, which scientists take as evidence that neither relativity nor quantum mechanics are complete theories. What we want is sometimes given the rather Promethean name of a Theory of Everything --a TOE --which would allow us to make sensible predictions about how gravity works at the quantum scale, but so far a good theory of quantum gravity has proven very elusive. String theory, which postulates that fundamental particles are not point objects, but instead minute strings of mass-energy whose frequency modes correspond to different fundamental particles, is an attempt to cope with the disconnect between relativity and quantum mechanics; quantum loop-gravity theory is another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Large Hadron Collider was constructed to help answer questions about conditions in the early universe. In particular, one of the major unanswered questions it was designed to look into is the mechanism by which particles acquire mass. The Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental particles and their interactions (via quantum mechanics) has successfully described all known subatomic particles, as well as the forces through which they interact, and although it is not complete, it's proven pretty solid ever since it got its name in the 1970s. The Standard Model also predicted the existence of particles which, at the time it was first being formulated, had not yet been observed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One reason certain particles --like the so-called "top quark" --had not yet been observed in existing particle accelerators was that such particles are very massive, and thanks to E=MC^2 we know it takes a lot of energy --a very high energy density --to create such particles in the lab. Such particles also tend to rapidly decay, as they shed energy, into other, more stable particles. The top quark was finally detected, after a long search, with a machine called the Tevatron --an enormous particle accelerator located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, USA. The Tevatron was a colossus --the main accelerator ring was 6.86 kilometers in circumference, and it collided protons and antiprotons together at TeV --trillion electron volt --energies. Decommissioned in 2011, it was during its operating lifetime the only machine powerful enough to create and observe the top quark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite its success, the Standard Model has some gaps, one of which is a mechanism for describing why particles that have mass, have mass (why a particle should need to "have" something as basic as mass is another question, but suffice to say there are reasons, which is why things like protons and neutrons have mass, and things like photons don't.) The Higgs boson is the particle --first hypothesized in 1964 --thought to be responsible for giving mass to certain fundamental particles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bosons are one of two classes of elementary particles (the other is the group known as fermions) and for certain reasons they are often force-carrying particles in the Standard Model --for instance, photons are the force-carriers for the electromagnetic force. When particles interact electromagnetically, they exchange photons. The bosons that mediate such interactions are called gauge bosons, and the Standard Model predicted a field --known as the Higgs field --with which elementary particles would interact in order to gain mass (a massless particle like the photon, by contrast, would not interact with the Higgs field.) The Higgs boson is the gauge particle of the Higgs field, just as the photon is the gauge particle of the electromagnetic field. The Higgs field, if it exists, would have a non-zero minimum energy in empty space.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finding the Higgs boson became, after the discover of the top quark, one of the most important remaining goals in confirming the predictive ability of the Standard Model.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem, though, is energy. Nobody really knew exactly how much energy would be necessary to observe the Higgs boson, and theory predicted that the Higgs field emerged about 10 to the minus tenth power seconds after the big bang --many orders of magnitude after the Planck Epoch (whose duration is the Planck Time, remember --about 10 to the minus 44th power seconds) but still so close to time=zero that the energy density of the universe was extremely high. It was thought possible that Higgs bosons might have been created in very small numbers in accelerators like the Tevatron, but to make them in large enough numbers to be observed with a high enough confidence to confirm the Higgs field's existence --bear in mind that Higgs bosons exist for too short a time to be observed; what scientists would look for are decay products specific to the decay of the Higgs boson --a bigger machine was needed. And that's where the Large Hadron Collider came in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><a href="http://bit.ly/11od0kI" target="_blank">Go to part 2</a></i></span></div>
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Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-65046377775532964152012-10-23T09:54:00.000-04:002012-10-23T09:54:29.463-04:00Short Subjects Part VII: S=k x logWDramatis Personae: Myself, Oldest Heir<br />
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Scene: Walk to school one semi-brisk October morning<br />
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OH: . . .So, anyway, I think the way this could work is --theoretically, anyway --you replace each neuron in the brain one at a time with an artificial one. That way you don't interrupt the continuity of consciousness and you eventually get consciousness in a completely artificial brain.<br />
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M: That's an interesting thought experiment. What about the body?<br />
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OH: Same basic strategy.<br />
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M: What about metabolism?<br />
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OH: What about it?<br />
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M: Well, I mean --you'd need some sort of energy intake. You know, an external source of energy.<br />
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OH: Yeah. I mean, look, what I'm going for here is really total self-sufficiency and physical immortality, OK?<br />
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M: Uh, doesn't the law of entropy forbid that?<br />
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OH: What?<br />
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M: Entropy. No closed system is a hundred per cent efficient, kinda thing? So you need some external energy source. Chemical, nuclear, whatever.<br />
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OH: OK, you know what I'm hearing? Quitter talk, that's what I'm hearing.Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-16861213348539739332012-07-04T10:48:00.001-04:002012-07-04T10:52:36.755-04:00An Inconvenient Truth, Part Deux"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">“The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">"Luxury has lost its luster."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">--Dana Thomas, <i>Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;"><i><br /></i></span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-39572154660918424812012-07-02T23:03:00.000-04:002012-07-02T23:03:00.755-04:00An Inconvenient Truth"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; border-collapse: collapse; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">I think most journalists are pretty lazy, number one. A little lazy and also they're spoon-fed information, such as the weapons of mass destruction back in 2003....you have these people who create a package of news, develop it as a story line, a scenario, and they find, as Mailer once said about the press, that they're like a donkey. You have to feed the donkey. The donkey every day has to eat. So [special interests] throw information at this damn animal that eats everything. Tin cans, garbage." --Gay Talese</span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-24407135412341209572012-07-01T11:51:00.000-04:002012-07-01T11:51:42.871-04:00An Update from "The Science of Scent" --Luca Turin's TED TalkThanks to Jon Edwards via Twitter for pointing this out. Luca Turin's <i>The Science of Scent </i>was the subject of my <a href="http://www.digressions-jack.blogspot.com/2009/01/blogging-neurology-and-perfume.html">first post ever on this blog</a> and he's also done a TED talk on his theory and some fascinating subsequent developments. Love his notion that a theory "is something that lets you do less work."<br />
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He is rather entertaining, as organic chemists go.Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-90607946812603976452011-05-23T10:54:00.001-04:002011-10-12T18:31:02.954-04:00Gödel, Incompleteness, and an Aging Brain<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/1925_kurt_g%C3%B6del.png/225px-1925_kurt_g%C3%B6del.png"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/1925_kurt_g%C3%B6del.png/225px-1925_kurt_g%C3%B6del.png" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 289px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 225px;" /></a>One of the interesting things about having kids is that they make you learn, re-learn, or realize that you have absolutely no understanding whatsoever of many things that you thought you knew, have forgotten, or prided yourself on understanding (erroneously.) Math, for me, is a biggy. Although I have managed to learn to read, when it comes to math I've always had a combination of genuine fascination with it, and almost totally functional illiteracy, at least when it comes to actually being able to calculate. One subject with which by which I was both intrigued and baffled for years was Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which were formulated by Kurt Gödel (left) as a refutation of the idea that mathematics could be put on a rigorously logical axiomatic foundation. He published his paper, which was a fatal torpedo in the side of the Good Ship Certainty, in 1931, under the rather diffident title "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Formally_Undecidable_Propositions_of_Principia_Mathematica_and_Related_Systems" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; text-decoration: none;" title="On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">On Formally Undecidable Propositions of </span></a></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Formally_Undecidable_Propositions_of_Principia_Mathematica_and_Related_Systems" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; text-decoration: none;" title="On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">Principia Mathematica</span></a></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Formally_Undecidable_Propositions_of_Principia_Mathematica_and_Related_Systems" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; text-decoration: none;" title="On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"> and Related Systems</span></a>."</span></span></span> <br />
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</div><div>Like most people who can't do math but are fascinated by things for which an understanding of math is essential, I had lots of people and circumstances on which I blamed my own incompetence (the usual suspects: the emotional rigors of childhood; indifferent teachers; a disastrously disorganized educational system) but the truth is people who really want to understand math generally find a way to do it, external circumstances notwithstanding.<br />
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</i></div><div>One of the most conspicuous examples is the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös (it is easy to think, considering their names, that an umlaut over a vowel in your name is a sign of predestination to mathematical genius) whose father was in a Russian POW camp for much of his childhood, and whose mother, who had lost Erdös' two older sisters to scarlet fever, kept him home until he was 10 years old, because she feared school was "full of germs" (which, in fact, happens to be true.) Erdös went on to become one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time (neck and neck with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who also published around the same number of papers, and who had a considerably more socially developed childhood than Erdös) but in adulthood was also notoriously eccentric --Erdös lived entirely out of a suitcase, never owned a home (or even stayed in one place for very long) and spent his entire very long and productive life staying in a succession of the homes of his colleagues. (He was also an amphetamine addict, and once declared "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems" though in his case substituting "dexedrine" for caffeine would have been more candid.)</div><div><br />
</div><div>Gödel was also notoriously eccentric --he was obsessed in his later years with a fear of being poisoned and when his beloved wife Adele died, he essentially starved to death as she was the only person he trusted to prepare his food. If people today know his name it is thanks to his famous Incompleteness Theorem. The Incompleteness Theorem is actually two theorems, which brought to an end a project which had preoccupied mathematicians for some time prior to Gödel's work: the attempt to develop a system of axioms which would form a perfect logical foundation for mathematics. Several such systems were developed, including Peano Arithmetic, something with the exotic name of Zermelo-Frankel Set Theory with Choice (you wouldn't want it without choice, would you?) and finally Bertrand Russel's <i>Principia Mathematica. </i>The idea that mathematics could be placed on firm epistemological ground was articulated probably with the most clarity and determination, at least among Gödel's contemporaries, by David Hilbert, who rejected the maxim <i>ignoramus et ignoramibus </i>("we do not know, and we will not know") that essentially draws an outline around what is even possibly knowable and says there will always be something outside that line. </div><div><br />
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</div><div>Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems are, I've read, very technical, and they have also had the interesting fate, along with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, of having had their meaning, or what many of us suppose to be their meaning, extended beyond the domain in which they were intended to function. I read about Gödel for the first time in Douglas Hofstadter's book <i>Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, </i>which I think I read when I was around twelve and most of which, of course, went rather over my head. Having the book around fed my desire to see myself as a deep thinker, though, and I do remember reading and understanding at least some of it. In particular I recall the bit about the Liar's Paradox ("This sentence is not true") staying with me, and spending a lot of middle school and high school with a constant sense of frustration that mathematical concepts could be so interesting but the actual study of the subject so tedious and humiliating. While Hofstadter, as far as I could, and can, tell, had a perfectly lucid grasp of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, I certainly didn't, and the idea that they showed that in general, the universe is a vast unknowable place where there are mysteries which science and reasoning can never unveil seemed to periodically rear its head as the years went by, and I gradually started to think of Gödel's work as implying exactly that --in a fuzzy, unexamined kind of way.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Having a fourteen year old whose math homework I wanted to understand, and help with if I could, made me go back to mathematics after an extremely long hiatus, and not without considerable trepidation. Much to my surprise I found out that after a lapse of some thirty years things like the quadratic formula seemed rather transparently sensible --I wasn't sure quite how, but following a series of clearly articulated steps to find the solution to a math problem no longer evoked a feeling of literally physical anxiety, but instead seemed soothing and actually philosophically reassuring. I still can't calculate worth a damn, really, but I can understand, now, the attraction of mathematics aesthetically. There is something cooly urbane about the formalism of numbers, and I am beginning to suspect that my retreating into books about science as a form of recreation, which was a habit I developed very early in life, stemmed from a sense, even on the low rent linguistic fringes of the actual math that is the real natural language of science, that that stately formalism was there.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Thus, ironically, I got interested in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem again, and after poking around the offerings on Amazon, bought a couple of e-books to read on the subject, one of which has been providing me not only with a lot of sweat inducing mental exercise but also a realization that Gödel's work tends to get shoehorned into a lot of philosophical discourse where it isn't a particularly good fit. The book is called <i>Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Misuse, </i>and while it is tough sledding at first (it contains sentences like, "Even if we have no idea whether or not S is consistent, we can prove the hypothetical statement, 'if S is consistent, the consistency of S is unprovable in S" which at first or even tenth reading are clear as mud) it does gradually put together the pieces of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in a way that makes both its structure and even the extent of the range of its meaning clear to a non-specialist reader. At least, to this non-specialist reader, after circling around it for thirty-plus years like a nervous fish around a shiny lure.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The Incompleteness Theorems, at least as far as I can summarize them (which is itself doomed to incompleteness --his original paper presented forty six preliminary definitions and several additional preliminary theorems before coming to the point) are as follows:</div><div><br />
</div><div>1. In any formal system S it is possible to make statements that can neither be proved nor disproved in S</div><div><br />
</div><div>2. For any formal system S, the consistency of S cannot be proved in S.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I am, as I mentioned, leaving out a lot --for instance, the stipulation that S must be a "formal system in which a certain amount of arithmetic can be carried out." The specificity of the theorems, though, is what both sets limits on what they themselves set limits on, and what gives them their beauty. To quote <i>An Incomplete Guide:</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div>"It is often said that Gödel demonstrated that there are truths that cannot be proved. This is incorrect, for there is nothing in the incompleteness theorem that tells us what might be meant by 'cannot be proved' in an absolute sense. 'Unprovable' in the context of the incompleteness theorem, means unprovable in some particular formal system."</div><div><br />
</div><div>Gödel rather famously found misunderstandings and minsinterpretations of his work irritating and he took particularly scathing exception to Wittgenstein's dismissal of the theorems as "trickery" (<i>kunststücken</i>) and his claim that the theorems could simply be bypassed; Gödel's response was (and he took a swipe at Bertrand Russel while he was at it):</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Russell evidently misinterprets my result; however, he does so in a very interesting manner. In contradistinction Wittgenstein . . . advances a completely trivial and uninteresting misinterpretation."</div><div><br />
</div><div>If persons of Russell's and Wittgenstein's apparent intelligence and lifelong engagement with the problems Gödel grappled with are capable of finding themselves vulnerable to such rough handling, maybe we can find our own difficulties in understanding his work forgiveable. For me it is just a pleasure --a reassuring pleasure --to find that there is, after all, in Gödel's work the same sort of exactness and splendidly beautiful formal specificity that I found reassuring about science in the first place as a kid . . . and to come a little closer to understanding it on its own terms. It's reassuring to find oneself able to learn, as one gets older. And I find myself delighted to have just a little taste of the same feeling expressed by a much finer mind than my own, that of Paul Erdös:</div><div><br />
</div><div>"I fell in love with numbers at a young age. They were my friends. I could depend on them to always be there and to always behave in the same way."</div><div><br />
</div><div>Perhaps that's exactly the reason I found mathematics so much more congenial the second time around, when life, as middle age looms, seems an increasingly dark business. Even if I'm still barred from citizenship in the metropolis of numbers, it's nice, in a violent and uncertain world, to know it's there.</div><div><br />
</div><div>PS. Erdös had a sense of humor, apparently. He once remarked, "The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems. The second is that he forgets to zip up. The third is that he forgets to zip down."</div><div><br />
</div><div>PPS. One of the most fun things about number theory is how simple the formulations of some of its hardest unsolved problems are. Witness, O Best Beloved, the Collatz Conjecture. It says simply this: take any natural number n. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1 (n3+1) and if it is even, divide by two. Take the result, and apply the procedure again. No matter what natural number you start with, you will always eventually reach 1 (and, the last three numbers of the sequence are always 4,2,1.) Despite its simplicity, the Collatz Conjecture, proposed by Lothar Collatz in 1937, remains unproven, and no less an eminence than Paul Erdös declared, "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems." But, you know, knock yourself out.</div><div><br />
</div></div>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-2421339960207004792011-02-06T12:29:00.000-05:002011-02-06T12:36:01.106-05:00A Prescient Quote<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Two of the most interesting books that I've read in the last few months are Dulles' The Craft of Intelligence, which is on the subject of intelligence gathering and espionage (and which strikes me as something that should be part of any politically engaged citizen's required reading, as the practice of intelligence is such an important part of the formation of public policy) and Bertrand Russel's prescient book length essay from 1922, The Problem of China.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I'd like to write a bit more about both, but here's a quote from the latter:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">"</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Chinese problems, even if they affect no one outside China, would be of vast importance, since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries"</span></span></span></div>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-40355172087882258162010-05-08T20:52:00.000-04:002010-05-08T20:53:56.731-04:00Short Subject: Good Advice<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This doesn't call for much elaboration.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> "If a man be bereft, give him solace. If he be in physical torment, give him medicine. If he be to the desire of death, give him hope. Reason, encouragement, and faith bring hope, therefore, use them liberally."</span></span></span></div>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-56670338616142270922010-03-14T23:16:00.000-04:002010-03-14T23:20:54.592-04:00Short Subjects, Pt. III: Becoming a VegetarianDramatis personae: Concerned Parent, Second Male Offspring<br /><br />Scene: Three PM, meeting the schoolbus.<br /><br />CP: Hi Sam! How was school?<br /><br />(pregnant silence)<br /><br />CP: Ummm. . . Sam, how was school?<br /><br />SMP: (angrily) Daddy, I am NEVER eating a HAMBURGER again.<br /><br />CP: Uh, now Sam, why . . .<br /><br />SMP: Daddy, they KILL COWS to make hamburgers.<br /><br />CP: Wow. Well, yes, uh, Sam, that's true. . .<br /><br />SMP: They KILL COWS.<br /><br />CP: So Sam, does, uh, does that mean you're going to be a vegetarian? Because, I mean, that would be fine, if you actually, you know, ate vegetables. . .<br /><br />SMP: Daddy, they kill a cow to make hamburgers. A SWEET, SWEET COW.<br /><br />After which, really, there is nothing left to say.Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-87295639590213452422010-02-20T14:57:00.001-05:002010-02-21T11:55:30.669-05:00Flowers for the Living: Me and MFK<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/S4A-3SYysjI/AAAAAAAAABQ/mGkRcKJHPes/s1600-h/mfk+fisher.jpg.bmp"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 258px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/S4A-3SYysjI/AAAAAAAAABQ/mGkRcKJHPes/s400/mfk+fisher.jpg.bmp" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5440417469413110322" border="0" /></a><br />She was a knockout all right --Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, who wrote, at the beginning of her autobiography <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gastronomical Me</span>, "The first thing I can remember tasting and wanting to taste again is the grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam. I suppose I was about four." One of the first books I can remember reading, and wanting to read again, was the classic collection of her works known as <span style="font-style: italic;">The Art of Eating, </span>made up of five volumes: <span style="font-style: italic;">Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">An Alphabet for Gourmets. </span>She was born in Albion, Michigan, on July 3rd, 1908 (with, according to her natal chart, rather an interesting cluster of planets in Cancer, her Sun sign, which would account for a great deal, if you any store by such things. I don't as a rule, despite having dabbled in astrology as an entertainment several decades ago --how I love to be able to say "several decades ago;" the ability to be condescendingly avuncular is almost worth the indignities of approaching middle age) and I was born later in the century, ten days after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so not only was I rather too young for her, we were geographically, demographically, and indeed in every other respect not only unlikely to meet but in fact destined to never encounter each other at all.<br /><br />I knew, however, and still know, her work like the back of my good right hand. I would like to be able to say I was delving into her enthusiastically at an impressively precocious age, but the fact is that the publication history of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Art of Eating </span>makes this unlikely; the version I spent countless hours reading was <span style="font-style: italic;">probably </span>the one published by Macmillan in 1971. (Was it though? I can't remember it never being in the kitchen, even in my early memories . . . and it never seemed new.) Certainly I remember the deft and spare line illustrations (by Leo Manso) and I remember the feel and look of the book as if it were still in my hands --the dark cloth cover, which even in my earliest recollection of it is already stained with kitchen grease.<br /><br />The book belonged to my mother, who'd emigrated from Manila in 1952 and met my father at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Drama in New York, and she liked to remind me occasionally that she had not only studied drama with the great Sanford Meisner (which at the time made about as much of an impression on me as if she'd boasted of being able to brush her own teeth) but also dance with Martha Graham (whose choreography, when I saw it first on PBS on our little black and white set in the kitchen, struck me as both twee and incomprehensible.) She was also, however, of that generation of Americans who were discovering cooking, and especially <span style="font-style: italic;">French </span>cooking, thanks to people like James Beard and Julia Child, and moreover, being Filipino, she cooked as naturally as breathing, and the thing I remember the most clearly about her during what was undoubtedly a turbulent divorce and several years of extreme personal difficulty was that at no time, and under no circumstances, did she ever show an indifference towards or disrespect for food and for what gathering at the table to share it meant.<br /><br />And so, naturally, I was disposed to fall hard for Mary Francis. She was, and I mean this with absolute seriousness, my first love, and naturally it was an epistolary one, although of course not in a literal sense. But her work probably sustained me more than anything else I read during my late childhood and early adolescence, as bizarre as that may seem, and I formed a lot of my first notions of what relations between men and women ought to be like, as well as many of my initial impressions of women in general, from reading what she thought and how she felt, about men, and women, and food. If there was no actual exchange of letters, I still read her work like someone getting missives from someplace exotic and remote --for a boy growing up in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1970s, places like Dijon, where she lived with her first husband Al Fisher, or the little village of Chexbres outside Montreux where she lived for too few years with Dillwyn Parrish, the painter (who left his wife Gigi, whom he'd married when the latter was a girl of sixteen and he thirty-three, for MFK) might as well have been on the dark side of the Moon. She was an <span style="font-style: italic;">intimate </span>writer, the sort who makes you feel as if you are alone together in small room in a big house somewhere very remote, having a private conversation, and the feeling was amplified by her strange combination --something I noticed even then, and perhaps the first time I remember noticing a writer making choices --of extreme self-disclosure and extreme circumspection.<br /><br />Dillwyn Parrish's identity was a case in point. The facts, I was to find out later (literally decades later) were straightforward --she had fallen in love with him, left her husband Al for him (both she and Al Fisher, and Dillwyn and Gigi Parrish, met for the first time in California but both couples were apparently already having strained relations) and she married Parrish in 1938. Their marriage was characterized by two things: deep love, and horrifying brevity. Parrish was diagnosed with Buerger's Disease, an inflammatory condition of the blood vessels which is both agonizingly painful and progressively destructive, in 1939, and after they fled Switzerland at the onset of the war for a cabin they shared in San Jacinto, he lived only until 1941, when his failing health and untreatable pain drove him to take his own life. But in her autobiography, she never calls him by name, she never names the ailment that drove him to take his life, and indeed she never mentions the cause of his death at all.<br /><br />Fisher did write about all that, naturally, but she wrote about it in the same way a benevolent witch might lead you safely through a haunted forest; by walking carefully around the places where the shadows are darkest. Nonetheless, I don't think too many people have ever written better about despair, or grief, and the chapter in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gastronomical Me</span> entitled, "The Flaw," is probably one of the best things ever written about one of the worst things you can endure: watching someone you love die and not being able to do anything about it. She wrote very well, too, about the privilege of having someone to talk to --that One other, as she put it --and about the cruelty of silence.<br /><br />More than anything else, though, she wrote about the strangeness of hunger. Mostly she did so by writing about food, but there are other hungers and other ways to feed them. In every book of hers there are chapters and passages that give you the same feeling you'd get if you happened to find, in a house you know well, a door you'd somehow never noticed before, and opened it. Her skill both as a writer and an observer was to never let her eye become clouded by the world in which she participated, and that unyielding ability to observe could sometimes be incomprehensible to those around her, as it was, once, to a Frenchman who became infatuated with her in 1938 during an Atlantic crossing (she was already married, then, to Parrish) and tried unsuccessfully to find some crack in her reserve of self sufficiency, and who finally said to her, at the end of their last meeting in a station restaurant,<br /><br />"'Go on eating. Go on sitting there with your food and your wine. I saw you first that way, alone, so god-damned sure of yourself. This is right. I'll leave now. Do this last thing and stay as you are, here at the table with the wine in your hand.'"<br /><br />Of course, he misread her, a bit; she goes on:<br /><br />"I must get home, I thought. I feel awful, like crying or being sick. I must get back to Chexbres. I drove as fast as I could. I didn't know what I would do when I got there, but I must get home. I never wanted to be alone again, in a restaurant or anywhere. . ."<br /><br />Aside from leaving me with a problematic preference for women with a certain reserved <span style="font-style: italic;">hauteur</span>, reading Mary Francis also left me (of course!) with a irrepressible desire to eat, exotically, for better or worse, whenever the opportunity presented itself. When I ate snails for the first time, at a long-vanished little French restaurant in an undistinguished stretch of 33rd Street in the mid 1970s, I didn't wonder whether or not I would like them --I <span style="font-style: italic;">knew </span>I would like them, thanks to MFK. And for many, many years, she's been a constant presence both on my bookshelf and in my head, and I still go to her for clarity and comfort.<br /><br />The thing that makes me the saddest, though, is that I never wrote to her. I don't know what she would have thought of a letter from an obscure fan in a small town in Pennsylvania, but I remember wanting to write to her when I was probably around ten, and for various reasons --none of them especially good --never getting around to it. When she died, in 1992, I felt a tremendous frustration, and a sadness which absurd as it may sound has stayed with me even today, because her voice --clever, wise, observant, cultured, and above all full of the strange music of her own heart --was a sustaining one for me over many years when I needed one, and I should have found, even for my own soul's sake, a way of saying so. It probably would have amounted to very little, and the silence at the end would have been the same --or no, it would <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>have. I loved her voice, which I always imagined having a thin, pleasant, no-nonsense quality to it, like another one of my favorite self-sufficient heroines (Charlotte A. Cavatica, who as I recall her also did not suffer fools gladly, though she had a soft spot for a good heart) and I would have liked to at least once heard it directed, even in one of those kind impersonal letters one often gets from admired authors, to me.<br /><br />Still though, what remains is the memory of having found out, when it was most important for me to do so, that it is possible to know that life is equal parts beauty and suffering, and that you can't have one without the other. Though the observation is banal, there is a particular joy in discovering someone who writes about it so well just at the time in life when you are discovering it yourself. That she wrote what I think one of her most beautiful books, <span style="font-style: italic;">Consider the Oyster</span>, the year her beloved Chexbres died, is a case in point. (I was pleased in a way I could explain to no one else there when, on a recent press trip to Montreux, our train passed stopped briefly at a station for Chexbres.) There are so many beautiful passages in her work that say this, in so many beautiful ways, but for some reason that I can't explain, one that seems to stay with me with all the intensity of an unexpected afternoon dream is a passage from the chapter "How to Make a Pigeon Cry," in <span style="font-style: italic;">How to Cook A Wolf. </span><br /><br />The chapter itself could not be, in some ways, more mundane, being a collection of recipes for handling poultry (and rabbit, which in her quietly defiant way she classes as poultry without explanation or apology) but it begins with a quote whose gastronomic bonhomie has behind it the shadow of <span style="font-style: italic;">timor mortis conturbat me </span>that any carnivore must feel --an epigraph from Swift: "Here's a pigeon so finely roasted, it cries, Come, eat me!"<br /><br />That hunger is desire and desire demands sacrifice is a point held in abeyance throughout the rest of the chapter, but there is another passage, at the end, which strikes at the complacency into which one has been lulled by her blandly soothing account of delectable procedures for rendering fowl edible with all the necessary pity, terror, and inevitability of the knife that descended on Iphegenia at Aulis. I have not been able to find any record of the text from which the quote is taken, and Fisher mentions only that it is from a book called <span style="font-style: italic;">Secrets of Nature, </span>by Wesker, which was published in 1660, and probably no chapter on how to cook poultry has ever been bookended by such precisely chosen sabotage of the comforts it spreads.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Take the goose, pull off the feathers, make a fire about her, not too close for smoke to choke her, or burn her too soon; not too far off that so she may escape. Put small cups of water with salt and honey . . . also dishes of apple sauce. Baste goose with butter. She will drink water to relieve thirst, eat apples to cleanse and empty her of dung. Keep her head and heart wet with a sponge. When she gets giddy from running and begins to stumble, she is roasted enough. Take her up, set her before the guests: she will cry as you cut off any part and will be almost eaten before she is dead. . . it is mighty pleasant to behold."</span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-12198342042564415842010-01-08T10:54:00.000-05:002010-01-08T11:00:01.335-05:00From the Inadvertent Visual Zen Koan Dept. . . .<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/S0dWescaW3I/AAAAAAAAABI/FbBTTZpneEI/s1600-h/zen_real_estate_cropped.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 329px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/S0dWescaW3I/AAAAAAAAABI/FbBTTZpneEI/s400/zen_real_estate_cropped.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5424399361517443954" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />Not much to add, really.Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-13879001697632093672010-01-01T15:50:00.000-05:002010-01-01T17:41:43.561-05:00How Do I Love Thee, N-[2-(5-methoxy-1H-indol-3-yl)ethyl] ethanamide? Let Me Count the Ways. . .<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Melatonin-3d-CPK.png/220px-Melatonin-3d-CPK.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 220px; height: 151px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Melatonin-3d-CPK.png/220px-Melatonin-3d-CPK.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />In my youth, which is now receding more and more rapidly with every passing year, like a distant red-shifted galaxy about to vanish over the cosmic horizon of mortality, I experimented, it gives me neither pride nor shame to own, with various enhancements to my neurochemistry. Most of these in retrospect were ill-advised (as were many of the decisions of my youth --of necessity, probably, youth providing one with virtually unlimited scope for poor decision making) and I would scarcely care for any of my children (or for that matter professional acquaintances) to encounter, on the great lavatory wall that is the World Wide Web, anything that might be construed as an endorsement on my part of legally dubious alterations to one's personal neurochemical environment. Nowadays I generally have recourse only to the occasional pleasures of judicious titrations of ethanol, which in addition to being one of mankind's most time-honored comforts (especially with the advance of age) is also practically a professional obligation, ever since I started earning my bread and cheese as what is sometimes referred to euphemistically as a hack for the slicks.<br /><br />In fact, most of the writers and editors I'm privileged to know enjoy a wee dram, either to take the edge off a chilly night, solace one for a lapse in inspiration, or blunt the edge of frustration (peace to the editors) of dealing with the combination of preening egotism and utter professional irresponsibility so characteristic of writers, as a class. One of the most common indications for having recourse to the happy by product of the action of our little friend <span style="font-style: italic;">Saccharomyces cerevisiae (</span><span>yes, brewer's yeast)</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>on grain or grape sugars<span style="font-style: italic;">, </span>however, in my new-ish circle of acquaintances, is to cope with the fear-unto-death that grips so many of us when confronted with the necessity of boarding an airplane. While frequent air travel has blunted the edge of my once almost paralyzing anxiety about flying it has by no means eliminated it, and my pleasure at generally being able to travel Business class (on the dime of the brands who are kind enough to make my overseas excursions possible) is often mixed with a certain anthropological fascination at the sight of Business class departure lounges, in which a regular percentage of travelers can reliably be found, grimly or joyfully according to their lights (and livers) getting outside of a few ounces of their favorite tipple as a way of anaesthetizing themselves against the reality of spending the next eight hours being shot through the thin, freezing air of the stratosphere at hundreds of miles an hour.<br /><br />While I yield to no one in my admiration for the practicality of this strategy I also have been encouraged, on many occasions, to try something with a little less in the way of undesirable side effects. Ethanol, as I still remember from my teaching days, inhibits the production of antidiuretic hormone in the pituitary gland, worsening the effects of dehydration experienced during air travel, and it also produces metabolic by-products like acetaldehyde which one is better off without. In sum, the problem is that enough ethanol to produce a really effective state of full-speed-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes carelessness is also enough to produce a host of unpleasant sequelae. Generally I find the game worth the candle, at least when it comes to fear of flying, but I consider myself obliged to keep an open mind when it comes to improving, psychiatrically speaking, on the gifts of nature, and in the course of things this year, found myself discussing with someone in a position to offer a reliable professional opinion, whether exogenous N-[2-(5 methoxy-1<span style="font-style: italic;">H</span>-indol-3-yl)ethyl] ethanamide --melatonin, in other words --might not prove a more practical alternative.<br /><br />Melatonin is interesting stuff. It's been used as a sleep inducer and cure for jet lag for --well, I don't know how many years, but certainly the folks I know who use it swear by it, and my reluctance to try it has been partly due to sheer force of habit and partly due to a suspicion that anything the body manufactures in microgram amounts (melatonin is made in the pineal gland, and is thought to regulate wakefulness) is probably risky to take in milligram doses. A little digging around, however, revealed that melatonin appears to have a very low toxicity (the average supplement delivers 3mg of the stuff per pill, and you apparently have to take something like 200 mg/kg/day before adverse effects become noticeable) and, having had a lifelong problem with insomnia as well, I decided, with some trepidation, to give the stuff a shot.<br /><br />All the wasted years. Melatonin has been, so far, a godsend. In addition to being extremely effective as an hypnotic during flying (nothing passes the time, even in Business, like shuffling off to Dreamland as quickly as possible) I've found it to be the first therapeutic in any pharmacopia (including various herbal remedies, which historically have been spectacularly ineffective --sorry, Jade Emperor, your Special Pill to Calm the Heart was about as effective against my insomnia as a BB gun against a dreadnought) that's made a dent in the chronic insomnia upon which I've counted to help me beat 11nth hour deadlines since high school. I think I've probably gotten more solid 7 hour blocks of uninterrupted sleep in the last month, since discovering melatonin, than in the entire previous . . . well, I don't want to say how many years. On top of that the stuff's apparently an antioxidant, potentially therapeutic for mood disorders, may have antineoplastic properties, and on top of <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span>, it might even be good for gallstones.<br /><br />Probably I'll find out in a few years that regular exposure to the stuff makes your nose turn green and fall off, but until I hear otherwise, huzzars for melatonin, says I. Between that and over the counter ibuprofen, the regular business traveler need fear no evil.<br /><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-size:11px;"></span></span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-73618551469330797912009-12-26T09:34:00.000-05:002010-01-02T12:27:37.279-05:00Short Subjects II: Growing Up On the Lower East Side of ManhattanMy oldest son is 13. We rode the local bus from our apartment building to his school the other day, and when we got off, he stopped for a moment to read a graffito adorning the scabrous front of a bodega near the bus stop. Someone had left there, written in black magic marker, the bitter missive: "4 AM, no beer. F*** you."<br /><br />Zach impassively regarded this scribbled outburst for a moment, and then remarked, "Of course, probably the last thing whoever wrote that needed is more beer."Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-73843877023151076792009-12-02T09:35:00.000-05:002009-12-02T09:38:02.656-05:00Short Subject. . .<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/A_Hare_Grows_In_Manhattan_1.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 225px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/A_Hare_Grows_In_Manhattan_1.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />It occurred to me, while taking a morning walk, that if you name a Microsoft Word document "Whats_Up" the resulting filename will be "Whats_Up.Doc."<br /><br />All the wasted years.Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-1491964730839972672009-04-25T11:00:00.000-04:002009-04-25T12:27:19.718-04:00Eric, Idle<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/GeoreOrwell.jpg/200px-GeoreOrwell.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 278px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/GeoreOrwell.jpg/200px-GeoreOrwell.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Eric in question is Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell. <br /><br />We go back a bit. I first read Orwell when I was around ten -I'd like to think it was out of precocity but it was really morbid curiosity. I was an avid Sunday Comics reader (I remember as a kid thinking my parents were nuts to prefer the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times,</span>with its perplexing lack of daily and Sunday strips) and one Fourth of July, <span style="font-style: italic;">Gasoline Alley </span>celebrated American Democracy by having one of the characters (I think it was Walt Wallet) have a nightmare about what it would be like to live in the universes imagined by Orwell in <span style="font-style: italic;">1984</span> and Huxley in <span style="font-style: italic;">Brave New World.</span><br /><br />I didn't really know or care all that much about totalitarianism or the erosion of individual freedoms by institutionalized hedonism, but I did have an interest in anything that smacked of something possibly off limits, and the result was that my Mom took me to the bookstore, after some pestering, and bought me a copy of each. <span style="font-style: italic;">1984 </span>had a dark cover, <span style="font-style: italic;">Brave New World </span>was an anaesthetic white, and I read both over a week or so. <span style="font-style: italic;">Brave New World </span>didn't have all that much resonance for me at the time -it felt closer in tone to a lot of the Golden Age science fiction I was also reading -but <span style="font-style: italic;">1984 </span>was a nasty shock. I had read a few books where, as William Goldman says in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Princess Bride</span>, the wrong people die (most notably <span style="font-style: italic;">Charlotte's Web</span>) but <span style="font-style: italic;">1984 </span>was much, much worse, because it didn't seem so much about the need to recognize some upsetting but fundamental realities (like <span style="font-style: italic;">everyone dies eventually </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">eating often means killing</span>) but about the fact that the wrong people<span style="font-style: italic;"> win. </span>It was a perfectly plausible depiction of something that was horrifying, and not just horrifying, but in a very specific way. Orwell didn't leave me with any sense of hope <span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span>, and it was the first book I'd ever read that had had that effect (and still one of the very few I can think of that's <span style="font-style: italic;">that </span>unsparingly bleak; even the most pessimistic writers seem to need to let a little light in. To this day, the four words <span style="font-style: italic;">He loved Big Brother</span> are the single most depressing sentence in English literature I can think of.<br /><br />I didn't get around to the essays, though, until last month. A collection of Orwell's essays was on an airport bookstore shelf, and I bought it to read on a flight to Zurich and back, having had, recently, a talk about Orwell with my friend, the writer Jesse Larner. Of course they were wonderful, and (of course) they were beautifully written and (<span style="font-style: italic;">of course</span>) one of the essays that struck home the hardest was <span style="font-style: italic;">Politics and the English Language</span>. I couldn't understand how I'd gotten this far along in life without at least having been exposed to his rules for writers. (One of the other big surprises was a long, fascinating, very warm essay on Henry Miller's <span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic of Cancer</span> -I would have bet anything if anyone had asked that Orwell <span style="font-style: italic;">loathed </span>Miller.)<br /><br />Orwell himself allowed that his rules were inevitably going to be broken, but didn't talk much about why that might be the case. The essay made me feel much better about writing about luxury goods for a living than I had in a long time, because at the very least, I could try and keep these rules in mind, and writing well (or at least, trying to write well) would have some meaning in and of itself; I would be trying not to be a party to language that "does your thinking for you." I'm not, now, sure that that's really the case -I suppose it's perfectly possible to write well and originally in the service of triviality or worse, and maybe it actually makes matters worse to do so -but the feeling that one has standards seems an important psychological survival tool.<br /><br />The subject of rules, and psychological survival (Well. <span style="font-style: italic;">Survival </span>is a little strong. People in concentration camps and in combat are trying to survive) came up most recently when an editor I work with did something very common: used the expression <span style="font-style: italic;">begs the question </span>to mean <span style="font-style: italic;">raises <span style="font-style: italic;">the question. </span></span>That question begging is actually a specific kind of error in logic -the Latin name for it is <span style="font-style: italic;">petitio principii</span>, a form of circular reasoning -is something lost on most who misuse the expression (there's a great little blog post on the subject from John McIntyre, copy editor for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Baltimore Sun</span>, <a href="http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2007/03/if_beggars_could_question.html">here</a>) including, until a few years ago, me. <br /><br />While I would like to think I share McIntyre's disposition towards usage (he describes himself as a "mild linguistic prescriptivist") and Orwell's devotion to precision, it's certainly true that I'm a bit of a know-it-all and there are few things more satisfying than a linguistically ubiquitous technical error to which you can, with an air of performing a community service, call your hapless interlocutor's attention. The fact that I can throw some Latin in there just sweetens the deal. <br /><br />But should I? First of all, the usage of <span style="font-style: italic;">begs the question </span>for <span style="font-style: italic;">raises the question </span>is essentially ubiquitous, and ubiquity is a strong symptom of an idiosyncratic usage achieving sufficient universality to require that it be acknowledged as acceptable (a point McIntyre makes as well, though he clearly doesn't feel that <span style="font-style: italic;">begs the question </span>is there yet.) Secondly, the real point of standards should be to facilitate communication, and surely most people who say <span style="font-style: italic;">begs the question </span>when they mean <span style="font-style: italic;">raises the question</span> are clearly understood. <br /><br />It's bracing to fantasize that in taking exception to it, I'm saving untold legions of future Winston Smiths a bullet to the brain, but of course the attraction of prescriptivism is at least in part a sense of intellectual superiority -snobbery, in a word. I'm still going to object to it though. First of all, man does not live by bread alone (one is entitled to a few acts of self-indulgence, intellectual and otherwise -or if not entitled one should at least acknowledge they're inevitable) and secondly, I do think the (mis)use of <span style="font-style: italic;">begs the question </span>obscures an interesting and fairly common error in logic -the substitution of an arbitrary assertion of the truthfulness of a statement for any actual proof or logical argument; linguistic authoritarianism for discourse.<br /><br />Linguistic prescriptivism easily shades into self-indulgent intellectual snobbery, of course. Probably every prescriptivist at one time or another both enjoys a primitive, primate-hierarchy sense of superiority when the opportunity to correct someone presents itself, and even Eric Arthur Blair doesn't completely avoid sounding a touch smug when he dissects his examples of poor and incoherent writing (though they are, undeniably, good examples of poor and incoherent writing. It occurs to me just now that telling people George Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair is another way to indulge my know-it-all tendencies. Also that Orwell probably would have had something to say about my tendency to be parenthetic, and overuse of semicolons. And digressiveness. Now where was I?) But at the same time, I just can't help but feel that his rules for writers are important -not as laws to be followed thoughtlessly (the very thing against which he spent much of his career as an essayist railing against) but as standards by which to judge one's own work. For the linguistic prescriptivist, snobbism is one extreme, and it's tempting to say that fear of being caught in a mistake is the other. But I think the real fear is much more fundamental: that of being a bad writer.<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-88746882385442495762009-01-06T21:39:00.000-05:002009-04-25T13:03:17.738-04:00Marx, Opium, and not reading the whole book. . .<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Karl_Marx_001.jpg/200px-Karl_Marx_001.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 282px;" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Karl_Marx_001.jpg/200px-Karl_Marx_001.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />A few years ago, my curiosity piqued by the ongoing debate over intelligent design (an interesting idea inasmuch as even dedicated theologians have struggled for centuries with the disturbingly large body of evidence that is as indicative of malicious design as intelligent) I took a stab at actually reading Darwin's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Origin of Species. </span>I was surprised to find Darwin an extremely gentle advocate for his own ideas -his tone is so carefully self deprecating, so literate, and so un-polemical that it stands in startling contrast to the often virulently ad hominem tone of his detractors. He comes across, in other words, as a nice guy, and one who was concerned to convey what he felt was the real beauty of evolution's miraculous proliferation of apparently inexplicable complexity of form and behavior:<br /><br />"There is grandeur," he writes in conclusion, "in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whist this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful, and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."<br /><br />I owe this rumination on authors taken out of context to a good friend who, in a recent email exchange on Orwell (we decided that of <span style="font-style: italic;">1984 </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Animal Farm, </span>the latter is actually rather the more depressing) pointed out to me that the famous quote from Karl Marx, that "religion is the opiate of the masses," is actually a graceless and unjust excerpt of a longer remark that speaks of a tremendous compassion for the misery of humanity and a desire to find some solution to it. So, thanks Jesse, and here's the whole thing:<br /><br /><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >"<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.<br /><br />"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.<br /><br />"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. . ."</em></span></span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-419891603870893518.post-11405709762667098422009-01-03T09:12:00.000-05:002009-01-03T10:05:47.114-05:00Blogging, Neurology, and Perfume<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/SV9zxzI7YDI/AAAAAAAAAAM/GUhDT_e0LTs/s1600-h/secret_of_scent.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 130px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lpLTfeoxFDo/SV9zxzI7YDI/AAAAAAAAAAM/GUhDT_e0LTs/s200/secret_of_scent.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287071786934689842" border="0" /></a><br />The idea of having a blog never particularly interested me before but I've been feeling more and more as if there are things I'd like to have on the 'net that don't necessarily fit well in some of the other venues I habitually use. Wristwatch discussion forums, for instance, are useful professionally and interesting personally, but they're hardly a good place for discussing (say) the neurophysiology of smell (or, in many cases, for being candid about watches in particular and the luxury goods world in general, for that matter.)<br /><br />Which brings me to the subject of my first blog post, a wonderful book by Luca Turin called <span style="font-style: italic;">The Secret of Scent. </span><span>It's been out a while -since 2006 -and it's interesting both as a sort of introduction to the fragrance industry (and it <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> an industry) and as a scientific detective story. The author's spent a good deal of his professional life researching the mechanisms by which we smell, and while he's profoundly fascinated by perfumes, their history, and their design, the book is equally an attempt to present a novel theory of how smell actually works. When I taught introductory neurology at the Swedish Institute we always had to gloss over a lot of the interesting details of how the special senses work -for one thing, stuff like conformational changes in photoreceptor pigments are not of immediate urgent importance to massage students, and for another the material came up at the end of the term, when I would have been hard pressed to get students to come to a lecture on how to use Swedish massage to cure cancer. So I'd parrot the conventional wisdom on olfaction: that odorant molecules bind to a repertoire of receptor molecules on the olfactory nerve endings, and that the almost infinite variety of scent sensations are achieved through the cognitive blending of a combination of receptor types. <br /><br />Like most explanations of neurological events, there's an air of hopeful hand-waving about all this, and Turin uses the lush world of perfume chemistry to introduce an alternative theory, which is that what we're really detecting is the <span style="font-style: italic;">vibrational mode </span>of odorant molecules. As a lapsed alternative medicine practitioner I'm predisposed to find anything that invokes molecular vibrations suspect, but as it turns out, the concept is based on well accepted chemical science -the vibrational mode of a molecule is more properly known as its Raman spectrum (after the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Chandrasekhara V. Raman, who discovered molecular spectra.) And there are databases of thousands of molecular spectra which have been developed since Raman became interested in the problem in the 1920s. While there are many open questions with the vibrational model, the notion that the nose functions as a spectroscope is a fascinating one. One olfaction researcher who pioneered the theory (Malcolm Dyson) wrote:<br /><br />"Let us commence the inquiry with a simple case -selecting some group of substances with an indisputably characteristic odor which is unlike that of the vast majority. . . I have selected the mercaptans (-SH) as the most suitable; once their powerful and clinging odor has been observed it forms a most vivid impression and most chemists would recognize it again. . . Is there any corresponding characteristic feature in their Raman spectra? The answer is that there is indubitably a <span style="font-style: italic;">unique </span>feature in the Raman spectrum of all alkyl mercaptans, a line with . . . frequency 2567-2580. <span style="font-style: italic;">No other compound has such a line." <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span></span></span>Turin also writes very beautifully about the challenge of understanding science:<br /><br />"In almost every science textbook, there is one point, usually of paragraph length, where the style of the author matches exactly one's style of understanding, and which we then grasp properly and permanently. The trick is then to read hundreds of books, so that the paragraphs gradually come to cover one's field of interest, like fliers strewn on a football pitch. This, over a period of about ten years, is what I tried to do with undergraduate solid state physics."<br /><br />And for someone like me, who lies awake nights wondering if writing about luxury products for a living is really an intellectually respectable thing to do, there are his wonderful insider's observations on the frustrating mediocrity that he observes in his own industry:<br /><br />"Ten years ago, a fine fragrance used to cost 200-300 euros per kilo. These days, 100 is considered expensive. Bear in mind that only 3 per cent or so of the price in the shop is the smell. The rest is packaging, advertising, and margins. The cheapness of the formula is the main reason why most 'fine' perfumes are total crap. Other reasons include slavish imitation, crass vulgarity, profound ignorance, fear of getting fired, and general lack of inventiveness and courage."<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span><br /></span></span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span>Jack Forsterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04410034944629010819noreply@blogger.com2