science

I was fortunate to attend a fascinating public lecture by physicist-turned-biologist Albert Libchaber at the UBC Pacific Institute of Theoretical Physics.

The main thesis of the talk was to suggest that temperature differences can account for a diverse range of important physical and biological phenomena.

One of the great blinders of science stems from the burden of provability: if something is not scientifically provable, then it does not have objective existence, and it's labelled as "superstition".

I am lucky to find "Genesis", a French documentary about the natural history of the Earth, on TPS Star tonight. Google takes me instantly to the schedule page of the TPS Star channel, informing me: Genesis Film documentaire de Claude Nuridsany et Marie Pérennou. 2004. Thanks globalization for the poor.

The Earth starts with molten lava.

As the fire burns out, steam comes out.

The steam is redistributed on the lava as rain, covering the earth and cooling it.

As the volume of steam gets redistributed as oceans, seas, rivers and lakes, the weather cycle is initiated.

The title gives it away really. It is the paradigm of dialectics (of which I have only a faint idea) to the study and theory of systems (of which I am trying to learn the rudiments).

Randomness is a measure of our ignorance.

Time has been often compared to a river, because it flows. But in which direction? Consider this: things that were once in the future will soon be past. So from our reference point, time flows in the reverse direction! And that makes us creatures that swim upstream :-)

Or, as U2 puts it in Zoo Station (from Achtung Baby):

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever. Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to remove.

Found in the very good programming book, Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley.

Subatomic particles have a property called spin which reflects their internal symmetry. Imagine a deck of cards: the joker is usually any figure that you would have to rotate 360 degrees to make it look upright. On the other hand, you would have to rotate a king or queen figure only 180 degrees to make it look the same. The first case is akin to a particle of spin 1, while the second is akin to a particle of spin 2. Intuitively, dividing 1 / spin yields the factor of 360 degrees needed to rotate the particle such that it comes back to identity. A particle of spin 5 could look, for example, as a star with 5 equal branches (because you would rotate it 1/5 of 360 to make it come back to the same position).

It appears to me that the Western mind has become afflicted with theophobia, or the fear of religion. This is apparent in the speech of the scientific community, which posits rationality (aka reason) on a high pedestal, and considers both emotionality and spirituality as inferior or even negative modes of knowing.

And this attitude trickles down to the Western social and personal level, where an individual who displays any spiritual tendency will be frowned upon by his peers - a supposedly tolerant and open-minded bunch, as opposed to the superstitious and fanatic Orientals. This happened to me today, when I innocently mentioned to a friend that I was attempting to cut down on my addictions during the month of Ramadan. The knee-jerk response I got was: "Oh, are you turning religious?" in a clearly derogatory tone.