Maybe the investors behind Planetary Resources should consider creating antimatter instead of building fuel depots on asteroids they want to mine since all they’d need to do to guarantee unimaginable profits is just a single gram of the stuff. Granted, the collider they’d have to build to smash ions until they decay into positrons and anti-hydrogen would cost tens of billions to build and hundreds of millions per year to maintain, but with a current retail price of $62 trillion per gram, they’ll make they money back handsomely, even if their economies of scale drive the price down to just a hundredth of what it is today. Weapons designers and space agencies would form a line around whatever mountain complex would house their giant ion smasher, since adding an infinitesimal quantity of this bizarre stuff adds a very powerful punch to any explosive reaction. And what about the energy industry using matter-antimatter reactions to catalyze fusion? After all, antimatter is the only fuel we know to offer perfect 100% efficiency. If we ever learn how to produce even a few kilograms of it per year, we’d be well on our way to cheap, plentiful energy and exploring the cosmos with relativistic rockets. And believe it or not, but that last part may actually be a lot easier then it sounds and we may be closer to it than we think.
When talking about rockets, it’s very important to keep in mind that there are different kinds or thrust we could produce and what would be extremely efficient in space would flop on Earth. To leave the planet, we need big, controlled explosions and while an antimatter additive would make for a much bigger boom and generate an incredible amount of thrust, a pure antimatter engine wouldn’t do much but irradiate everyone and everything around it. Instead, it would work more like an ion thruster, releasing tiny particles that slowly but surely push a spacecraft to incredible velocities rather than provide a quick, swift kick up to speed like liquid hydrogen does in conventional rocketry. So the basic idea is that antimatter in a Penning trap, would be fired at any matter we aren’t very fond of anymore, annihilate it producing the amount of energy predicted by Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence equation, and as that energy starts leaving the nozzle, it decays into tiny short lived particles that physicists call pi mesons, or pions for short. Blasting out a stream of pions at very high speed would be what gives antimatter powered spacecraft their relativistic velocities. The only problem is that while the annihilation in their engines’ cores is perfectly efficient, the nozzles are not, and previous studies came up with somewhat disappointing numbers, giving the engine a 36% efficiency rating at the very most. Not good news at all.
However, according to a new paper by a duo of physicists using the same software that CERN uses to figure out how particles are colliding in the LHC, these past models are outdated and with just a little tweaking here and there, antimatter engines could actually be 85% efficient, allowing a spacecraft to reach 0.7c which works out to a blistering 756,000,000 km/h. For comparison, the ISS orbits at 28,000 km/h and the fastest spaceship currently traveling through our solar system, New Horizons, tops out at 58,536 km/h. They also found that the magnetic fields needed to govern the matter-antimatter reactions would have a strength of 12 Tesla. Today, a magnet operating at 25 Tesla can be found at a university research lab, so the technology need to operate an extremely potent antimatter powered engine actually exists right now. The only problem is that we just lack the adequate amount of fuel to make it work. We’ve made millions of antimatter particles but the production is an extremely inefficient process and less than 1% of all the antimatter created is effectively trapped. There are natural processes that make antimatter and magnetic fields around planets do trap it, however this antimatter is very short lived and very rare. You’d need to get to the center of the galaxy to find enough of it to even think of powering a spaceship with it. But the paper’s authors are more optimistic, pointing out that no one has really tried to tackle the issue of antimatter production for industrial use, and that most fuel sources see their supply increased exponentially as we learn more about them and their uses, which drives the demand for them.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe we could explore trapping naturally occurring antimatter or exploiting a new means of creating billions of antiparticles at a time with lasers and millimeter thick gold leaf as part of an engine or a reactor, immediately channeling them into a reaction chamber rather than trying to trap them. Certainly all the energy required to make the antimatter would mean that it’s a highly inefficient fuel source on its own, but that hardly matters for rockets because we’re far more concerned with the reaction being efficient rather than trying to balance the energy equation, and when using tiny amounts of it as a powerful additive to more conventional fuels, its contribution could offset the costs of producing it. For example, if we could use antimatter to create a powerful pulsed nuclear laser capable of creating a tiny artificial black hole we would use as an engine for a spacecraft or a power source, we could get more antimatter as that tiny little black hole feeds and belches an occasional stream of antiparticles under the right conditions. Of course a scenario like that is not exactly a weekend project on the horizon, but it’s amazing what sorts of things you find out when you actually try to figure out how to accomplish something ambitious and complicated. In theory, we have some very interesting uses for antimatter as a fuel. Maybe we should try to make more of it to find out how it works in the real world…
See: Keane, Ronan and Zhang, Wei-Ming. (2012). Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization arXiv: 1205.2281v1
Apparently, the real problem with why research and technology grants and investments don’t always work out as planned and generate cures for diseases and revolutionary new tools, isn’t because science is hard and a lot of barriers between idea and finished product have to be negotiated by experts, it’s because the scientists and engineers aren’t being vetted by the public and wasting taxpayer money, according to an article which laments both Obama’s and Romney’s lackluster approach to tackling science and tech funding. Really, much of the piece is riddled with cliché anti-science gems which sound not too dissimilar from a spoiled brat’s mid- shopping trip tantrum at a toy store. What do you mean I can’t have that toy? What do you mean we can’t buy it today and take it home? You’re the worst parents ever! I’m going to go and complain to grandpa and grandma if you don’t buy it for me! Of course the author is more adult about the subject, but his demands are basically a grown-up version of the same thing. Either scientists and engineers give him cancer cures and computers to read his mind and do his chores for him, or he’s going to go to politicians and tell on them so their funding is cut, every failed experiment is punished. This is his proposed roadmap to "fix science." Until it breaks.
Taxpayers in America are used to spending money and getting something concrete in return. Very seldom will they spend cash just to have someone figure things out without necessarily delivering the solution, and when they do, they’re unlikely to do so again. So after investing a lot of money into a particular tool or line of research over many years, they expect a return on their investment in the form of a new gadget or a new drug. But while that may be a good attitude for investing in a company or shopping at the mall, it’s not a good idea to apply the same kind of expectations to what is inherently a process of repeated trial and error with few givens. Yet, that’s exactly the attitude we’re apparently supposed to do with complicated technical and scientific matters…
Neither candidate will ask, for instance, why taxpayers spend some $30 billion annually to try to understand the basic causes of diseases but virtually nothing on delivering effective new medical therapies to the ill. Or why the departments of defense and energy invest enormous resources in developing military technologies difficult, if not impossible, to translate for civilian applications.
Here’s the thing. As said before, science is hard. Really hard. Nature could not be bothered to give any less of a flying monkey’s tail rash about how much we spend trying to cure cancers. When a single tumor comes with six different strains of the disease, as was recently discovered, yeah, it’s going to take scientists a minute or two to figure out how to do the medical equivalent of simultaneously putting down six ninjas, each armed with a different weapon and approaching from a completely different angle, without killing a hundred bystanders in the process. People dream of robot butlers doing their chores for them and since people I know I worked with projects related to AI cognition, they ask me when we’ll have those all the time. Their ears quickly whither just as soon as they realize how much raw computing power it takes to crunch data from the environment and run through all the calculations to come up with a conclusion, and how far away we are from being able to design an algorithm that will let a robot make you breakfast in less than five hours and without being custom built for your specific kitchen. Yes, we are taking big leaps towards this, but affordable robot butlers might be decades away at best, and yes, there is a very real worry that they’ll steal thousands of jobs in the process.
Sure, you might get lucky and leave a dirty lab for a while, then come back and find out that you incubated filth so potent that it can be harnessed to effectively treat almost any bacterial infection in humans, creating a medical revolution that added decades to life expectancy. But more often than not, you’ll fail to develop a new, effective, safe medication some 999 times out of 1,000 after a decade or so of work. Likewise, technology we had to custom build for war won’t necessarily translate well to the civilian world because we don’t build guns and missiles anticipating that they’re going to be converted into sewage pipes or drills. Whenever you start to pile on too many uses for any particular tech stack, you’ll end up with a monstrosity that doesn’t perform any of its intended tasks well. Your computer can’t also be your microwave and shower. Of course we have internet communication protocols, miniaturized electronics, and new alloys and plastics making a leap from sword to ploughshare, but many very specialized systems simply can’t make this kind of jump. But hey, don’t listen to a geek like me because I’m part of the problem. You see, the geeks have this "peer review" policy that makes it hard for laypeople to participate in reviewing a scientist’s or engineer’s work. That’s just so elitist, isn’t it?
For much of the past 65 years, the scientists and engineers have essentially told the government, “Trust us.” Through the self-regulation of peer review, scientists and engineers essentially judge the value of their work, resisting attempts to permit ordinary citizens to express their preferences, either directly or through elected representatives. Despite some significant exceptions, such as research on certain diseases and in specific areas of national security, [the following] philosophy of government-funded research has prevailed: Government can decide on what level to fund S&T, but research priorities should be [under] the purview, chiefly if not exclusively, of the scientists and engineers themselves.
Come on folks, when I posted the preprint to a project on which I was working, how many of you took a look at it? About a thousand people looked at that post yet the silence was deafening. Don’t think I’m offended. The likelihood that I’m going to read a very specific medical paper by a doctor whose blog I read is also low since I do not have an adequate education in medicine to make an educated decision on the value of the work. And if you know that I’m not educated enough to review medical research, why in the world would you ever think that my opinions about it should drive funding policy for this line of study? Would you trust me to detect a problem with these papers or not get too carried away with a false positive? Yet, according to the logic above, because my taxes pay for this work, I should have the right to review it because the customer is always right and I’m the customer. This is plainly ridiculous and given that so many Americans simply tune out when a discussion is outside their area of person competence, we’d get science by wish list rather than actual scientific research that explores what’s possible and what’s out there. Science by mob rule is unsustainable. Just think of all the petitions from overzealous creationists demanding that evolutionary biology get cut off from the NSF. Imagine how many scientists would be punished for not getting a potential cancer cure right on their first try. In such an arrangement, small minorities of zealots and activists will easily outshout the majority of rational participants, creating a recipe for fiscal and scientific disasters. Want to fix science? Just let it progress in peace.
If you’re gainfully employed for all intents and purposes, and one day find yourself off work sick because while your boss wants you at work he or she isn’t interested in your germs also being in the office, you might give in and turn on some of that horrifying daytime TV. And between all the shoestring budget game and talk shows, the latter of which tend to exploit human misery and ignorance for ratings, you’ll be bombarded with countless ads for colleges. Hey you there on the couch, these ads say, fed up not having work or only working part time, always struggling to make ends meet? Got to college and not only will you get a job, you’ll make a real salary, the kind that will make your parents stop calling you a bum! We’ll help you go to college too! Just log on, sign up, and start going to classes next week to be on your way to a rewarding career! These ads have be on for a number of years now and it’s become firmly entrenched in the mindset of those underemployed but both very ambitious and very determined, that college is the key to a better life and that graduating will bring them jobs, cars, houses, savings accounts, and all the other things they want, just like the college recruiter told them.
Kind of cruel, isn’t it? After all many of the colleges aggressively advertising to those who believe that a degree will vastly improve their lives are infamous for subsisting almost entirely on government grants, charging all if their students and arm and a leg to attend, widespread fraud on financial aid documents, and after having their students sit through courses accredited by agencies with no standards, they spit these students back out with unsustainable debt, and just as few job prospects as they had before. While what many for-profits do is usually legal, except that fraud on financial documents part, it’s unequivocally unethical and it’s made so much worse by the fact that after they’re done with a student, he can’t continue his education elsewhere or get a regionally accredited degree without having to start from scratch because his for-profit credits count towards squat at a properly accredited university. How is this legal? Well, aggressive lobbying is one reason, and how reverently we view any form of education as being a gateway to a career. Unfortunately, colleges are not magic and those who think that rushing to class will help them get a job should ask themselves who’ll pay their bills for the next three to four years and how they plan to pay off their loans if they won’t find a new job quickly…
As odd as it may have sounded, I’ve said multiple times that the web did not change human sexuality nearly as much as we’re often told and much of the novelty is really just well forgotten antiquity ranging from Roman orgies to the personal and highly publicized perversions of Marquis de Sade. And aside from making it easier to find and talk to our fellow perverts, not a whole lot has changed about our sexual appetites, despite threats of runaway pornography addicts from angry conservatives and alarms about men quickly becoming more sexually deviant from borderline misandrists. In fact, I’ll even bet you that transhumanist sexual fantasies of computer-assisted mind-melding is an extension of 1960s New Ageisms in which quantum vibrations along with large quantities of drugs and meditation have been substituted with machine-neuron interfaces and very big leaps in some very hazy new areas of computer science. But all this said, I’ll grant you something unique when it comes to the fantasies of futurists known as AFSR or a fetish for humaniod robots, often custom built to turn one’s wildest fantasies into reality and trained to be the perfect object of arousal. And according to new literature looking at human and computer interaction, that market could be very lucrative for a lot of people…
One of the more recent summations of how comes from Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars’ scenario for a robot brothel that would substitute advanced versions of Real Dolls we have today for flesh and blood women, a scenario that could put a real dent in the amount of human trafficking, misery, and woe that’s inflicted on many sex workers shuttled around the world to staff illegal establishments ran by organized crime groups. No need to torture a human and subject her to countless risks when one can just buy a robot and sanitize it after every use, then simply pay for the maintenance and amortized depreciation. And the manufacturers would certainly make plenty of male models too because contrary to popular opinion, women do pay for sex to ensure they’ll get the experience they want and you will be hard pressed to find be a more certain return on their investment than a robot. Now you could still imagine an illegal industry trading in real humans for added kink, but when a much safer, legal, and human option is within easy reach, it would more likely become a niche market. Try to outlaw robotic call girls and boys and you’d have to bring a case which would put any sex toy under threat of a swift illegalization and create an uproar from voters. As for the robots themselves, they’re just doing what they will be programmed to do and nothing you can do or say will hurt them since they’ll lack real emotions.
Not for long though, says David Levy in his 2007 book which declares that with enough advancement in AI, a whole string of human-robot relationships and even marriages will take off. From a psychological standpoint, his thesis is sound. There are numerous people out there who crave attention from other humans but simply don’t know how to get it, using Real Dolls and products like them as not only sexual but emotional surrogates which actually serves to make them even more befuddled by the seeming irrationality of who they sometimes call "organic partners," creating a cycle of co-dependence on their synthetic substitutes. Add some AI that will make those machines more animated, give them perceived moods and ideas, and voila! Why even look for a bothersome, unpredictable, hormonally driven organic partner when a controllable synthetic one is right here and could be fine tuned to be exactly what you’d like? And if you spend years taking care of this machine, why not somehow commemorate the bond just like the organics do? Well, that’s where we enter the legal realm’s difficulties for this scenario. You won’t be able to marry a robot for the same reason you can’t marry toasters or cell phones. Even AI-enabled machines are not entities with free will that can give their consent. If you write a boyfriend or girlfriend routine, of course the robot will consent to whatever you want. It’s in the code.
Also, what about the courts’ idea of whether the human can legitimately even consider marrying or being in an emotional relationship with a robot? It would be one thing if humans didn’t seem to show a preference for the company of other humans, but we do. And as we’ve seen, those who may be the most likely to treat a robot as we would treat a significant other could well be substituting human contact. Would a judge consider someone who finds himself — because let’s be honest, it’s usually males who experience this — unable to relate to girls or women around him and turns to inanimate objects for emotional and sexual gratification, as mentally fit to have a legal relationship with any entity other than another person? On the other side of the argument, I could see activists making the claim that we can’t force someone to conform to whatever the social custom is at the time because that’s discriminatory, and argue that a sufficiently engaging AI should have personhood and be allowed to give consent for things like marriage. But these are not going to be easy arguments to make and if there ever are official human-robot marriages or a big explosion in human-robot relationships, expect there to be a lot of acrimony about it in the media. There won’t be smooth transitions and any incident in which human users of sex bots get injured or an AI goes haywire will be agonizingly dissected during the debates.
According to what we’re often told, if we work hard, study, get good grades, and go to college, we’ll have good jobs that let us make a steady living and the typically poor college student days will be long behind us as the president of a university hands you your graduate degree. Sure, you may not have the life of plenty but you are definitely clearly of having to go on welfare to feed yourself, right? Actually, maybe not. As it turns out, there’s a disturbing number of PhDs on food stamps working odd jobs after all the schooling and hard work that would make them immune to the trials of the working poor, according to the prevailing societal truisms. Many times, the initial reaction is to say that it’s really not that huge of a problem, especially compared to the millions upon millions of non-PhDs currently out of work and that these situations are almost certainly temporary. Of course one could see why not a whole lot of administrators and pundits would be interested in talking about PhDs on welfare at any length. It really drives home the fact that a lot of long-held American beliefs about education and income can vary widely from reality and that you could do everything right only to end up having to file for aid.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the PhDs who have trouble turning their education into stable incomes. Quite a few undergraduate students are also ending up making a lot less than they may have expected, and while you can say that the compensation premium for a bachelor’s degree hasn’t changed very much even during much of the Great Recession, the worst salaries in decades have effectively made that premium worth far less than it once was. In fact it’s a neat accounting trick that helps for-profit trade schools and college lenders. They can lure in students by showing the relative premium of a college degree but forget to mention that in real dollars, this premium gives graduates far less purchasing power than they had five years ago. Oh and that’s if they do manage to get a job, which may or many not even be in their field. But come on, they did the right thing, they’re obviously on the way to something great, right? After all, they studied hard enough to get into college and after applying themselves earned degrees, exactly as mom, dad, and everyone else around them told them they’ll have to do to get a good job and start a career. How could it be that we send millions of students to college to spend all that time, money, and effort, and have them rewarded by crushing debt and unemployment?
But the sad fact is that this is exactly what we obliviously do while pretending that the system in which we’re working is fundamentally just and seldom fails to reward hard workers and good scholars. All right, why don’t we look at it another way? A lot of the welfare PhDs spend tens of thousands of dollars getting degrees in all sorts of humanities disciplines for which there’s little demand so surely they must be to blame for their bad situations. How many people will be interested in employing someone who wrote a dissertation on the social dynamics portrayed in silent films? Who but a handful of universities need a PhD in theology? This may be a good way to salvage the seeming fairness of the system but it’s fundamentally flawed. Yes, as I’ve said many times myself, you can’t rely on a degree in humanities to pay your bills, but at the same time, the problem isn’t that humanities PhDs are ending up with big loans and empty pockets, it’s that a degree does not guarantee sustainable, full time work. Even the most highly demanded STEM disciplines are subject to the whims of the market and predicting exactly what will be needed in what city and by what companies in four years before you even start your first class, would be an exercise in clairvoyance. Yet we expect college students to perform this feat every year and then fume when they fail to fare any better than a psychic. Of course they can’t do it.
On the part of the humanities scholars who find themselves out of work and academics who find themselves under attack, some write articles berating modern society for ignoring their passion for crass consumerism. I understand it may be disheartening to know that the world cared more about Twilight than Joyce and I agree, it’s really quite sad. At the time time, people need food, shelter, security, roads, and medicine. It’s not that PhD after PhD is discarded by society for daring not to care about the latest Angry Birds sequel or choose to study the most obscure language in the world to mine it for insights into human culture, but that it’s immediate and material needs have to take precedence over their academic ones. Society doesn’t tell you to crank out a little metal widget because it needs to print some navel-gazing self-help treatise or load another trite pop bleating on iTunes, but because it needs to fix a road, or develop a new antibiotic, or write some new software to keep important financial transactions secure. It doesn’t want the luxury to plan for its new generations and the best you can do it try to be at the right place, at the right time to find a career close to what you like to do, and when you get there, there may not be a reward for college or good grades and a C- student may be your boss. This is how our world works today and let’s not pretend that there’s some magical combination of degrees, GPAs, and professional credentials that will save you when you find yourself in a really bad economy…
As if to prove my earlier post about the alarming preponderance of pseudoscience on the left, a tidy gem of nonsensical drivel every bit as bad as you’d hear from a devoted creationist managed to land on my radar. It’s one of those breathtakingly inane pieces by a starry eyed disciple of quantum and biocentric woo that inspires nothing less than bouts of misanthropy and makes you think that a species capable of not only producing, but promoting this wretched garbage doesn’t deserve to explore space or extend its lifespan. Maybe I’m too harsh on the writer since she’s a fashion commentator but why in name of Cthulhu’s sweaty old jock strap does any editor let a fashionista write a treatise about evolutionary biology and quantum physics? Worse yet, to what degree does said fashionista have to suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect to be blissfully unaware that she’s further out of her area of competence than a giant squid on a space station is out of his natural habitat? Ok, all right, I’ll try to same something nice about her post. It’s not William H. Depperman level insane. Really, that is the best I can do for you in the nice department before tearing into what passes for substance in this mess.
Now, remember that New Age human origins stories and creationist tales are extremely similar, they just use different buzzwords and come to a different conclusion at the end. Whereas religious fundamentalists declare that after being created humans must worship their one true deity not to get tortured in the afterlife, New Agers twist their spirituality into a sort of theistic secularism in which any deity you worship is just fine and dandy, as long as you recognize that you should worship someone or something because it created you. Because both systems want to convince you that you’re created rather than evolved, and are just lucky to even be here, they’ll use very similar rhetorical tactics of decry evolution in its scientific sense as an utter impossibility and do it by horrifically mangling its definition, the evidence for it, and what it entails, all too often proclaiming that visionary scientists are rebelling against the very notion of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology we know today like so…
An interesting experiment and indeed correct in that we are still evolving, however to attribute it to the Victorian, matter-based, Darwinian model of evolution is backward-thinking and flawed given the recent leaps and bounds in metaphysical sciences and physical historical evidence [against] linear evolution. The ideology [that] we randomly mutated from ocean slime to knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation is one that [has] been dogmatically accepted into mainstream evolutionary hegemony without challenge until recent years.
Holy shoggoth on a fish stick, where do we start? Probably the first thing to do would be to point out that what was laid out before us was the Pokemon model of evolution rather than an accurate description of how living things change and survive, and that this imbecility is absolutely no different from Ken Ham’s big declarations of how science is overthrowing evolutionary theory or parodies intended to ridicule evolutionary biology by those who lack any understanding of it, often willfully. Considering that we see all living things, including us, evolving and going through natural selection regardless of what self-proclaimed experts will tell you, there should be no doubt about the idea that life on our planet is in constant flux. But apparently, there’s all sorts of unnamed, uncited evidence that evolution is all wrong and a good chunk of this evidence apparently comes in the form of metaphysical treatises. Astute readers may recognize that metaphysics is just a buzzword-larded branch of theology, also known as speculations about the supernatural, also known as musings of a creative bunch really not interested in any tangible scientific research or experimentation. If utter ignorance with a nod to those who spend most of their time speculating about the sound on the color blue are your best challenges to the theory of evolution as it stands, no wonder it continues to be the mainstream idea.
The latest science suggests we are intelligently designed not by some sentient humanistic being from on high, [by] a higher, energetic, source intelligence. Einstein’s Unified Field theory equation was completed in 2007. The breakthrough proves everything: matter (which derives from energy, which is what we’re made from) all natural laws and processes link to one underlying, unifying consciousness – aka, God, Source, Allah, Yaweh – pick your favourite.
Paging Charlene Werner to the know-nothing ward, paging Dr. Werner. Why do New Age crackpots love to do their best impressions of Marquis de Sade’s more aggressive experiments with the hired help on the laws of mass-energy equivalence? How do they graduate form middle school not knowing what the term energy even means to then go on and abuse it to justify their notions of mystical vibrations? Matter is not some sort of a lower vibration of energy, it’s very much its own thing. But since it can be generated by energy, it can be turned back into it with the speed of light in a vacuum square representing the exchange rate of the transaction. That is all that mass-energy equivalence says about our bodies’ composition. How this points to some sort of big, irrefutable volume of proof that a singular entity spawned the cosmos, only our overzealous fashionista and a stable of quantum woo cranks who would fail a basic physics class seem to know. Just like a fundamentalist will point to the Big Bang and say that it was God’s hand, so too does this New Ager and declare it so by virtue of her ignorance of how mass-energy equivalence works. And of course there are almost magical invocations of the bizarre quantum realm which serves as the New Age deus ex machina for the most outlandish woo…
Quantum physicist Amit Goswami supports the existence of a God consciousness, “The evidence for God is within us, but to see it we have to be subtle. To live it, we have to grow. Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things – God and the world – but one thing, consciousness. But the problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monastic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. Quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics.”
Quantum physics studies some very strange things. Very strange. Things that laugh in the face of causality, typically obeying the laws of physics only begrudgingly, delighting in every possible loophole they can find. At the same time, however, quantum mechanics has nothing to do with deities or consciousness, just motions and fluctuations of matter and energy in their smallest and most critical phases. If you’re not studying matter, energy, or their discrete quantum states, you’re not studying anything. You’re gazing into your own navel while you ooh and aah at the lint trapped in it and pretend that you’ve found some great insight into the workings of universe. Saying that quantum physics is not a magical mantra that lets you justify anything you want is not an indictment of scientists’ myopia, it’s like pointing out the fact that no matter how much you try to pretend you’re an enlightened, non-corporeal entity, if a car hits you, it will crush your bones and squish your organs. And the sheer arrogance of this New Ageism just makes my head spin. No, it’s not that they have no proof for all their wild assertions, it’s just that you’re too materialistic and simple-minded to grasp how their oh so precious and open minds see the quantum hand of God. It’s just arrogant creationism at its very worst.
Really folks, it’s ok to say "I don’t know" once in a while. The world will not stop. The universe will not descend upon you with an unholy fury if you take a minute to admit that you don’t have all the answers instead of going off the rails with abject nonsense. Here’s an exercise for all you New Age types out there. Pick a quiet room in your home, sit in the lotus position, and ask yourself some big, really big questions. How did life arise? What triggered the Big Bang? Where did I leave my keys? What is the purpose of my life? Does size matter? And as you feel yourself starting to pull out whatever vapid cliché you read in The Secret or Deepak Chopra’s attempts to mimic a complete thought, stop and say aloud "I don’t know." Just keep doing that until you start to ask new questions about how life should be defined and what quantum physics really studies, and realize that you will never know all the answers because you’re just human and that repeating "quantum" or "consciousness" will not summon a library of empirical data proving whatever belief you hold. That partial knowledge against a very confusing and constant hum of questions to which there are no easy and convenient answers, is the human condition. Make the best of it rather than wasting your time reassuring yourself with stylish nonsense.
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait is irked by the counterpoint that anti-science attitudes permeate the Left just as they do the Right, calling it false equivalence. Certainly it’s not like liberals have no unscientific views and the bedrocks of anti-vaccination sentiment reliably tend to be highly educated liberal towns, and yes they have a thing for quantum woo and post-modernist pretentions but could you really compare them to the organized and deliberate efforts of creationists and religious fundamentalists on the warpath? After all, it’s not like there are groups of people in white flowing robes attending meetings in liberal districts to deride school boards for the blasphemy of teaching their children "the left-brain arrogance of science" instead of "the story of how they were created by Mother Earth as spiritual manifestations" from whatever dimension is all the rage nowadays, so the conservative fundamentalists must be worse, right? Well, no, not exactly. Comparing the anti-scientific attitudes of different cultures isn’t really all that straightforward and there isn’t a simple mitigating factor to use as a trump card in declaring the greater or lesser evil. And in this case, the issue is primarily about focus.
Generally, most skeptical blogs follow the same trend as many scientists when they approach liberals and see them as more or less natural allies in spreading facts and education. After all, conservatives often add an inordinate amount of animosity to anything that contradicts their dogma and will immediately start bashing all the groups they loathe in response. But just because the left doesn’t object to teaching good science doesn’t mean that its anti-scientific attitudes aren’t a problem or that they can be downplayed when talking about anti- scientific movements. Just like religious fundamentalists have creationism, New Age converts have a theistic evolution narrative that muddles quantum mechanics and a hodgepodge of scientific jargon into pointless ruminations on the nature of the human soul. They will also follow self-aggrandizing notions of determinism which argue that humans are a predetermined outcome of evolution, and whatever they’ll need to add to the idea to make it work, they will. At the turn of the past century, they added heavy doses of Occultism, mysticism, and spiritualism. In the middle of the century, they layered on conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, based on either real world events, their ruminations on Occultism, or a bizarre mix of both. Nowadays, there’s a vast and diverse range of conspiracies, ancient astronauts, pseudoscientific profundities, and plain old woo that’s been repackaged for new generations as some great illumination into the secrets of the universe.
While the religious fundamentalist will pound the Bible with his homeschooled kids and teach them that they are to devote their lives to a deity that created them and requires their submission and that they are treat every fact contrary to this premise as inherently false and evil, New Age disciples will tell their kids that science is a materialistic, left-brained, arrogant pursuit of truth without the use of meditation that falls pray to conspiracies by bizarre secret societies, and that they’re spiritual beings who can get in tune with nature. In either case, we have anti-scientific attitudes preaching that science leads to nihilism and that the only true path to knowledge lies elsewhere. Yes, sure, the New Age followers of post-modernist woomeisters who fill up HuffPo with their best impressions of The Dude when it comes to scientific literacy (because you know man, gravity is like your opinion and anyway, it’s not like we know what gravity was meant to teach us) aren’t trying to change the law to get quantum woo into the classroom, but they are certainly not friends and allies of scientific education. They just view science as a starting point for their brand of beliefs. Get someone educated enough about quantum physics and biology and they’ll be able to "get it" when you talk to them about the alien visitors and life being a holographic projection of your past consciousnesses, just like any New Age bestseller will lay out for you.
But despite the long standing dedication to warping science into justifications for their personal beliefs, New Agers lack the kind of focus you get from a single, dogmatic, and very zealously religious following which is a lot less forgiving about making it up as you go along and demands far more conformity in beliefs. The right is much better organized and unified in its efforts, something you’ll hear from every blogger covering their war on facts they don’t want to hear and findings they don’t want taught. If you were surrounded by two dogs, with one barking, snarling, and foaming at the mouth, and the other circling behind you more or less quietly, you’ll pay a lot more attention to the threatening beast right in front of you, as you probably should. However, you shouldn’t assume that the dog behind you won’t bite you when you’re not looking or that its jaws can’t put you in world of hurt just because it’s not actively threatening you right now. And so while the homogenous vocal right lets out war cry after war cry, a lot of science bloggers fail to highlight the far more calm, but very virulent anti-scientific rumblings from the subdued and more heterogeneous left, Phil included. For me, it’s very hard to say that the right is more anti-scientific than the left because as creationists support a pro-pseudoscience bill, rabid anti- vaccinationists are pushing for exemptions from immunizations while citing conspiracy theories…
[ illustration by Yang Xueguo ]
Why did the state of Tennessee just let a bill allowing teachers to preach creationism in the classroom if they really felt like it without any repercussions? Well, according to writer Tom Bartlett, it’s because evolution isn’t an exciting enough story for the public while creationism has the right mix of sex, violence, and drama to vie for people’s attention. In fact, evolution isn’t even a story at all, he continues, citing a professor of psychology’s conclusion that evolution’s lack of a protagonist, motivation, or determined outcome disqualifies it as what we would call a narrative. And yes, technically there is a point there. When we’re talking about evolution, we’re not selling a story about the triumph of intelligent life slowly but surely culminating in us and continuing until we’re immortal transcendent beings of pure thought, as New Age inspired sci-fi would have us believe. Instead, we look at a nearly 4 billion year process of trial, error, random events, and odd twists and turns that managed to create the world we see today. True, to many people that’s not a satisfactory explanation for how we got where we are today and it deprives them of a sense of purpose and being divinely spawned for a noble cause.
But here’s the big question we should all ponder for a minute. Since when is it our job to make sure that facts fit in with the narratives people want to hear? Wouldn’t we just be lying to them if we misrepresent the data we collect and the research we conduct? And for what purpose? To make them believe us not because we have the data but because we cherry picked and massaged it for popular appeal? If the goal is to simply tell people what they want to hear, why even bother doing any science in the first place? Might as well just concoct a good story and run with that. This is why, as Bartlett notes, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne cites religious beliefs, not the quality of evolution as a popular narrative as the main culprit in evolution denial and he has the data on his side to prove his point. When he cites polls in which some 60% of Americans say they’ll just continue with their belief system no matter what they science says, that’s not even a red flag anymore, it’s a wailing alarm. If you really think that you’re going to get people who reject science to suddenly accept it when you just let them substitute their personal ideology for facts they don’t like, you are headed down the path to this…
At the very least, though, evolution’s weakness as a story creates a PR opportunity for creationists. For example, one Christian Web site tries to fit evolution into a standard fairy-tale narrative, telling the intentionally absurd tale of an amoeba’s transformation from salamander to monkey to man, all thanks to a character called Mutation who just waves a magic wand. It doesn’t read like it was written by someone with a background in biology, but it’s hard to disagree with the conclusion that evolution is a “strange story.”
Well of course it’s a strange story when it’s written by someone who has no idea what evolution is and tries to desperately wrangle it into a narrative of personal glorification, i.e. that humans are somehow the pinnacle of the evolutionary process or at least on their way towards it and our appearance was predetermined, or to turn it into a laughable parody of the facts. And of course it doesn’t fit into our tidy self-centered vision of nature, but then again neither do electrons, or black holes, or stars, or quantum mechanics which can technically violate causality according to a recent experiment. That’s the whole point of doing science, to find out what can and what does happen rather than weave a tale everyone involved finds palatable. Those so wrapped up in all the dogmas they hold so near and dear they will rabidly refuse to let them go no matter what, and treat something that challenges their views with contempt without even bothering to try and understand it, are just not going to care what the facts have to say and it’s their attitude that’s the problem here, not the data. As long as they don’t hear the story they want to hear, they’ll move goalposts, argue, and dismiss anything that we have to say out of hand no matter how much evidence we present. Further insulating them from facts by demanding that we give room for their favorite just so stories in science classrooms only makes things worse for everyone.
Just like giving a petulant child who throws an embarrassing temper tantrum in the middle of a store what he wants is a bad parenting strategy, placating anti-scientific crusaders by letting them do whatever they please, dismissing all the damage they do to public education and discourse as their inalienable right, is pretty much the absolute worst way to teach science. Next time the hypothetical spoiled brat wants something, he will just throw another tantrum in a public place to force you to submit. And next time anti-science crusaders want their preferential treatment from school boards and lawmakers, they’ll just engage in the same hysterics and paint any effort to teach actual science to potential future Babbages, Einsteins, and Darwins, as nothing less than a war on their very right to exist. Appeasement is not a valid strategy against those who believe that their word is to be treated as law and once in a while, they need to be politely but firmly told that while they have a right to go to whatever house of worship they want and pray to whatever deity their desire in any way they see fit, schools will teach objective, documented, verifiable facts to students, not serve as their indoctrination centers.
Once upon a time, I wrote about some of the serious downsides of cyber vigilantism. Yes, it can give a voice to those who suffered an injustice and the system either doesn’t care or doesn’t want to do its job. It can make sure that a wrongdoer gets his or her comeuppance. But it can also incite vicious mob mentality and take it to absurd extremes. While few such cases make a big splash in the U.S., in the most wired country in the world, South Korea, these cyber witch hunts have been accused of driving actresses and singers to suicide, and the incessant fury of the online hordes can splash into the popular media with toxic effects. Take for example the instructive story of Dan Lee, a.k.a Tablo, a rapper whose online harassment became a national news story after he was accused of forging his Stanford degrees and dodging the draft, despite his Canadian citizenship exempting him from compulsory military service. In response, Lee had the media ask Stanford to print out an official transcript for him and the university gladly produced it. Yet, the attacks continue and he is still declared to be a fraud in a style not at all dissimilar from the birther movement. But why was he being harassed?
Leaving aside the various dramas and the cast of rather sketchy characters profiled many times already, one of the key issues here is that in the online world, the mob follows a narrative that motivates it into action, not a set of facts per se. Obviously, not everything you see on the internet is true because after all, the internet hosts the musings of the Time Cube guy and at least a dozen retellings of all the elaborate conspiracy theories that were forcefully crammed into the Illuminatus Trilogy. Ordinarily, that pseudoscience, postmodernist New Age woo, and conspiracy mongering would simply lay there in forgotten or obscure corners of the web because it needs some sort of catalyst to take off and ensnare its followers and prophets. And these things certainly can and do find disciples who are either confused by science they want to understand but can’t quite grasp, or will not accept as valid for whatever reason, those who want to seem scholarly and profound without putting in all that much effort into either, or those eternally paranoid that someone is out to get them. Nasty tales about a celebrity are even easier to embrace, especially in a culture like that of South Korea, where any mediocre high school student shouldn’t end up getting a graduate degree from Stanford with a good GPA then do music.
In fact, most of the rage regarding Lee was about his education and how it should’ve been impossible for him to get good grades at an elite college since by all accounts he was a do-nothing in school. His critics seem to be incapable of considering that he may have demonstrated a talent that was interesting to Stanford and took his studies seriously when he realized that this time, grades are serious business. Getting into elite colleges in the U.S. is not a matter of having the right test score or having the right GPA, or joining enough clubs. But in many people’s minds, that GRE/SAT/GPA/extracurricular digit combination is like some sort of numerological incantation that opens the doors to Ivy League institutions and life-long prosperity. This is why parents will all too often drive themselves and their children crazy with endless study and college prep tests, especially when we’re talking about Asian cultures where the right test score can determine your path in life. For some of Lee’s most outspoken tormentors he either cheated by getting into Stanford, which means that their kids’ admission to an elite school would now be meaningless, or he lied and never went to Stanford which would mean they’re doing everything right with their kids. And so they chose to believe the latter because it required no change on their part and no reevaluation of their priorities or their parental style, just verbally crucifying a rapper.
Crowdsourcing is the hot new thing in the sciences. Social sciences look at how people solve problems in an extremely large group. Biologists, astronomers, and physicists are designing games to harness the creativity and energy of an army of dedicated players to find exoplanets, find how proteins fold, and solve cosmological mysteries no supercomputer seems to crack with any degree of efficiency. Intelligence agencies want to get a vast network of informants to get real-time data about every global hotspot from those on the ground. And a lot of tech executives are thinking of ways to monetize the wisdom and power of the networked crowds. That’s not an easy task since crowdsourced services must be reliable, instantly available, and standardized. How would a company get predictable, reliable, quality work from a loose association of people on the web? The military, intelligence agencies, and scientists with addictive games can lure in participants by the tantalizing natures of their tasks. But who wants to sit there and sort business addresses all day for peanuts? Well, a team at MIT decided to focus on at least one facet of monetizing crowdsourcing: making the crowd respond quickly.
Speed was something they certainly got. Workers responded to task alerts within 500 milliseconds when the alerts came within about five seconds of their pre-recruitment for a task. Even 20 seconds out, the responses still came in under three seconds. Not bad at all for a crowdsourced real-time system but then again, it’s not a startling result because the crowd was being prepaid for its services, limited to 50 people, and tasks came at them quickly and furiously. So we know that the crows replied quickly but we don’t know how well it did or if its reliable enough to be prepaid for projects more complex than making a simple classification or clicking some buttons on a form. A fun fact mentioned in the paper was that spam is actually a really massive crowdsourced endeavor paying about 0.5¢ per word. You see how well that works, right? Or rather you don’t because you live in the 21st century and have spam filters for your e-mail and IM. But really, do take a trip to your spam folder to see how many ways one can misspell words you wouldn’t ordinarily think would be that easy to misspell and the sheer amount of hours and effort wasted on something that won’t be seen by some 99.999% of its targets and if it is, promptly deleted and blocked. Bottom line: crowdsourcing menial tasks isn’t all that great.
Even worse, with enough computing grunt and a big enough server farm, you could do the work of a massive crowd in performing said menial tasks, and probably with higher accuracy because your program will not drift off or get bored. It’ll be cheaper and more reliable too. Crowdsourcing shines when users are given complex and challenging things to do. Scientific research currently tapping dedicated gamers and amateur astronomy buffs are seeing their data analyzed faster and faster and veteran users are tackling more and more complex problems which yield possible answers to questions that stymied small labs unable to throw adequate brain power at the problems. And that may well be where the future is, crowds being paid to tackle complex issues, design new products, and come up with practical applications for new ideas to monetize them, earning cash rewards in the process to keep them engaged and excited. Maybe the future of work isn’t sitting in a drab gray cubicle from 8 am to 5 pm, but lounging in a coffee shop, playing a game that could help molecular biologists unlock new pathways for more effective drugs, or helping programmers fine-tune their designs for oh, say, I’m just going to guess an aspiring AI framework or something like it by experimenting with it, and getting paid by labs and corporations for all their efforts and the mountains of useful data they’ll generate?
See: Bernstein, M. et al. (2012). Analytic methods for optimizing realtime crowdsourcing arXiv: 1204.2995v1
