Universe

Arecibo Oh NO!

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:34:48 -0800

Dear readership, As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand. The Arecibo telescope is the world's largest radio telescope and currently the source of all the data processed and used by various (and already much-maligned) SETI projects, particularly SETI@home. Currently, it's facing massive budget cuts that will effectively end its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S.2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills, understandably ignored in the midst of pressing social issues and an upcoming election, desperately need more support. Arecibo is, for all intents and purposes, our eyes and ears to the cosmos. The data it provides is enormously important in all kinds of astronomical science, and to the search for intelligent life in the Universe, which in my opinion is the most significant and noble of the scientific quests, and has far-reaching ramifications for all of humanity. To give up on Arecibo because of benign funding issues is to swaddle our entire race in a cloak of anthropomorphic narcissism, to cease to care if there is anyone else out there, to be so content in our self-serving and destructive worldview as to stop looking for other answers. This is such a huge issue that should never be in the half-assed hands of the U.S. Congress. It's insane. Please spend ten minutes visiting the SETI@Home site, printing out a letter, and posting it. It's a ridiculously mild expenditure of your time considering the issue at hand. This isn't even politics! It's the HUMAN RACE and our place in the COSMOS we are talking about. Without the error-correcting machinery of science, we are lost to our subjectivity, to our chauvinism, to our longing to be central to the purpose of the universe. One of science's alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional. -- Carl Sagan More information about SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence): SETI Institute SETI@Home SETI League

Life On The Space Station

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:35:22 -0800

Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that it might now be visible from Earth. His calculations showed it scheduled for a fly-by that evening, so he ushered a group of us outside to the parking lot and commanded us to look at the horizon. Suddenly, a point of light slightly larger than a star emerged from the night. There it was. It shot across the sky in a graceful arc, growing larger as it flew directly above us. No one said a word. It seemed incomprehensible that men and women were up there, in that tiny point of light, swallowing beads of floating water and conducting esoteric experiments. I felt inexplicably proud of this achievement, glad to be implicated in it by virtue of my membership in the human race. Despite the thrill, however, it was humbling: here was a minute dot of light, speeding across the sky as it encircled the Earth. From their vantage point, the astronauts aboard the ISS saw dozens of sunsets a day, saw the world in all its complexity as a blur of browns and blues, felt safe and massive in their technological warren; but from Earth we could see them as they really were, one blip among millions, a hunk of metal shining among massively powerful stars and the vastness of space. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On an unrelated note, now would perhaps be an appropriate time to announce the soft launch of a new project, Space Canon. I will be reading every important science fiction book ever written and blogging about the process, and it might take years. Any other heads are welcome to follow along in my journey, provide suggestions, and make comments like "After reading Neuromancer, I too think the Wachowski brothers should be sued for plagiarism!"

Dark Mission Insignia

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:45:38 -0800

Although I've read a great deal about the fantastically oblique heraldry and insignia of the purported "black world" of the U.S. military -- namely in the (recommended) work of Trevor Paglen -- I've never come across it in the flesh, er, vinyl decal. Imagine my joyful surprise at discovering a treasure trove of mission stickers, identifiers, and decals at the small-aircraft annex of the Portland International Airport this week. Apparently pilots of all stripes pass through and leave their mark. Decode at will, and read more here.

The Grid

Sun, 25 May 2008 23:00:00 -0800

The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on. A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the fundamental nature of matter. By all accounts a significant accomplishment: that something as massive and as diplomatically enlightened as this machine could be made in such a fiercely nationalistic era, that the technology even exists, and that the sheer logistical nightmare of its operations could be overcome. And, while the imminent revelations of the LHC will undoubtedly chew up much of my scientific ruminations in the next few years, it's just these, the logistical operations, that I'm currently interested in. This is because (unbeknownst to many) the LHC project has a second, more pragmatic, tentacle. It's called the Grid.

What is the Grid? Some experts are calling it a "parallel internet." Although this is, in many ways, a reasonable moniker, the Grid is primarily the solution to one of the LHC's most important problems, which is the outrageous density of data it will begin to emit the second it goes live. Like, 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, the analysis of which will ultimately require some 100,000 CPUs of processing power (NUMBERS!), which thousands of scientists around the world need to access and analyze in order to make a lick of sense of it. Rather than be stored on site at the CERN in Switzerland (the site of the LHC), this data needs to be distributed globally, parsed, narrowed down, and parceled out to the 7,000 physicists who need it. How will it work? Hence the Grid: a system of dedicated 10 gigabit per second fiber-optic cables connecting the Large Hadron Collider's crazy monumental magnetic detectors directly to the CERN computing center (or centre, if you will), then outwards throughout the world in a three-tiered system. The raw data is tossed into tape storage at CERN, then transmitted on these same fiber-optic cables to 11 "Tier One" research facilities, who are responsible for reprocessing the raw data and redistributing it. Next down the line are the 150 "Tier Two" centers, mostly universities, which are located all around the world. The data arrives here via standard Internet protocols (i.e. using the regular ol' Internet, albeit in the guise of general purpose research networks, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network), and is then disseminated to all the physicists for their invaluably real-live human analysis. Here is a useful schematic for understanding how the Grid works, if you want to get more technical, i.e. see diagrams. In any case, we're talking about 55,000 servers already installed, with another 145,000 on the way in the next two years. Remember when everyone was freaking out about the Googleplex? That's nothing. This fiber-optic network is 10,000 times faster than the fastest existing broadband. My friend Scott, who told me about the Grid, was like, "get ready for holographic video!" It's huge. I could throw around confusing approximations like, "it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 movies on IMDB," but suffice to say it's a massive upgrade from the kinds of Internet speeds we're used to.

It seems strangely appropriate, strangely telling, that the CERN would implement this system. After all, the research facility was fundamental in implementing the Internet protocols that would bring about this first wave, that would enable me to sit here at my kitchen table and interface blindly with a nebulous and globally-distributed network of information, an absurdity in itself. I see it as inevitable that the Grid, or a system like it, is going to mold our communications, our media, our daily lives, in ways we can't possibly imagine or predict. In his writings, the computer scientist -- and fabulist, although aren't they all, the good ones -- Vernor Vinge, no uncertain proponent of the ever-developing Technological Singularity theory, noted that "every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence." What he meant was that the end of the human era (which he argued would occur "[not before ] 2005 or after 2030") would come with a whimper, not a bang -- "even the largest avalanches are triggered by small things," he added. I don't imagine that the Grid will go all Skynet on us, but if the history of the Internet tells us anything, it's that we can't predict, nor can we place enough expectations, on the exponential nature of its evolution. Besides, Vinge wasn't spooking us when he wrote, in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post−Human Era, that "even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare." It is a nightmare, not least because it is strangely probable, but also because the Grid is so inextricably linked to the Large Hadron Collider, this fountainhead of certain scientific revolution, the two projects so potent with possibility, sinister and otherwise. Fellow science fiction heads will recognize this kind of setup from so many novels. The audacity of man is unbreakable. And what if all the LHC reveals to us is that matter is only information broken down into infinitesimally small parts? We would already have begun to recreate it, a new universe slowly subsuming the last, only to awaken, unsolicited, in order to ask its own, similar questions about its place in the universe. It makes me feel crazy to think how profoundly the future refuses to remain at bay. A prediction: even while the Large Hadron collider offers a final, unquestionable answer about the fundamental nature of the Universe, it's the Grid that will change the world, slipping in like a legislative footnote and blooming, guileless, the final nail in the coffin of the twentieth century.

Political Science

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:00:00 -0800

As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true. However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science political administrations (and social climates, to boot) of the modern era. If it's not the suppression and censorship of reports on subjects like climate change and pollution, it's the stacking of scientific advisory panels, the stem-cell debacle, ridiculously under-qualified NASA appointees, the insanely dubious removal of scientific information from government Web sites, or the misguided millions pouring into Prez Bush's "New Vision" for space exploration. Remember when the Bush administration removed the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" from NASA's mission statement? Really? It is with a profound sense of purpose, then, that I bring you this information about the respective science policies of the two Democratic candidates for president of the United States of America. Most of this information comes from statements made by the candidates' surrogates at a science policy debate in Boston last week, as well as from the candidates' official websites and press releases. Basic Research Obama: Plans to double federal spending for basic research over five years, supports making the Research and Development tax credit permanent, and plans to strengthen funding for biomedical research, as well as better improve the efficiency of that research by improving coordination both within government and across government/private/non-profit partnerships. Supports stem-cell research despite the alternatives, stating that "embryonic stem cells remain unmatched in their potential." Clinton: Clinton plans to "end the war on science" by doubling the budget, within ten years, of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the basic and applied research at the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Plans to rescind the ban on ethical embryonic stem cell research and to straight-up ban political appointees from unduly interfering with scientific conclusions and publications. Lastly, plans to require that federal research agencies set aside at least 8% of their research budgets for discretionary funding of high-risk research, and plans to increase investment in the non-health applications of biotechnology in order to fuel 21st century industry ("the future"). Climate Change Obama: Plans to reduce Carbon Emissions 80 Percent by 2050 with a market-based cap-and-trade system requiring that pollution credits be auctioned off. Plans to build incentives that reward forest owners, farmers, and ranchers when they plant trees, restore grasslands, or undertake farming practices that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plans to invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy, invest in low-emissions coal plants, and begin the transition to a new digital electricity grid (as opposed to the slow electromechanical switches and relays used today). Also plans to establish a 25 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require that 25 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal by 2025. More information about Obama's energy plans here. Clinton: Clinton's plan would ostensibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds from 2030 projected levels, more than 10 million barrels per day. Major components of this plan: increased fuel efficiency standards, helping automakers retool their production facilities through $20 billion in "Green Vehicle Bonds," a new cap-and-trade program that auctions 100 percent of permits, and a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund, paid for in part by oil companies, to fund investments in alternative energy. Plans to revive and expand the national assessment on climate change, expanding the assessment to include not only the anticipated impacts of climate change, but also how U.S. regions and economic sectors can respond to climate change through mitigation and adaptation. Also: plans to require that all federal buildings designed after January 20, 2009 will be zero emissions buildings. Cute! More information about Clinton's energy plans here. Science Education Obama: Wants to increase the number of foreign students in U.S. graduate school and "give them a path to citizenship," as well as improve minority scholarships. Plans to provide additional resources for public schools to adopt proven science, technology, engineering and math programs. Clinton: Clinton plans to triple the number of National Science Foundation fellowships and increase the size of each award. Plans to create new fellowships at the National Science Foundation to allow math and science professionals to become teachers in high-need schools. Supports initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the math, science, and engineering professions. The Internet and Technology Obama: Believes in an open Internet! Strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet. Supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. Furthermore, encourages diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, and plans to create "Public Media 2.0.," the next generation of public media that will birth the "Sesame Street of the Digital Age." Wants to implement sensible safeguards that protect privacy online, and supports restrictions on how private information may be used, as well as technology safeguards to verify how the information has actually been used. Plans to "bring government into the 21st century:" wants to implement wikis, social networking tools and other transparent communications technologies in daily governmental operations, plants to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making. Lastly, plans to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. Much more information about Obama's technology plans here. Obama at Google, talking about improbable lives and net neutrality. Clinton: The Clinton camp seems to have only one major stance when it comes to the Internet, which is a plan for the federal government provide tax incentives to encourage broadband deployment in underserved areas, and, correlatively, a plan to financially support state and local broadband initiatives. Clinton was quoted on Meet The Press as saying "I want to have as much information about the way our government operates on the Internet so the people who pay for it, the taxpayers of America, can see that. I want to be sure that, you know, we actually have, like, agency blogs." Also, her website is not as cool as Obama's. Space Exploration Obama: Obama hasn't released any information about his official plan in regards to space exploration, although there's some buzz that it will happen this month. In the interim, nerds are aflutter over an alleged leaked space plan, which you can read here. The leaked plan, if there's any truth to it, is very awesome, and includes some smart (and realistic) initiatives, such as support of unmanned missions, a vow to keep weapons out of space (yay), and some space-based climate change surveying. The leaked plan, however, does support the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and the Ares I Launch Vehicle, which is a disappointment to me because I can't stand to think of any Bush space policies lingering around after his dismissal. Clinton: The Clinton camp has made several statements about space exploration and aeronautics. Clinton plans to pursue a "21st century Space Exploration Program," by implementing a balanced strategy of robust human spaceflight, expanded robotic spaceflight, and enhanced space science activities. Furthermore, Clinton plans to develop a comprehensive space-based Earth Sciences agenda, including full funding for NASA's Earth Sciences program and a space-based Climate Change Initiative. Most surprising of all, in my opinion, is her call of reversing funding cuts to NASA's and FAA's aeronautics R&D budget. Clinton on space exploration, briefly. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More Information: Obama Campaign Science Fact Sheet Breakdown of all the candidates' science and technology stances (From Popular Mechanics) Clinton's Innovation Agenda

Happy Valentine's Day From Universe

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0800

This Is Where I Live

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:02:59 -0800

More data as I gather it.

Book Review: A Cosmic Samizdat

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:29:54 -0800

In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous global communication, all bets were off, and what went down was almost always marked with catastrophe (as with the indigenous people of North America) or powderkeg-and-a-match mutual distrust (as with the first United States naval expeditions to Japan in the 1850s, a cultural collision that is beautifully explored in Charles and Ray Eames' 1972 film The Black Ships). There are, of course, exceptions to this grim surmisal. When such a meeting takes place on a smaller scale, and is filtered through the lens of a profound -- and autonomous -- common interest, only good can come of it. This is a roundabout way of getting at the nucleus of my new favorite book, Jacques Vallée's UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, which documents the first meetings between Soviet and Western UFO researchers at the dawn of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, a period of transparency in Soviet politics which effectively lifted the Iron Curtain from decades of underground paranormal research and samizdat dissemination of literature. This is what happened: In 1990, one of the world's most respected and most rigidly scientific ufologists -- Vallée -- was invited by a Soviet press agency, Novosti, to visit the USSR in the wake of one of the country's most controversial waves of UFO activity, the infamous Voronezh sightings. On arrival, Vallée discovered a rich community of well-organized researchers, the ironic result of censorship itself forcing Soviet ufology into unofficial underground networks, where it flourished. On this unusual result of the Iron Curtain, Vallée is almost nostalgic: "It was obvious that knowledge was revered here to a degree that our information-saturated world had forgotten...Russia has never had a distribution system...ideas percolated among students, scholars, and private groups who created a verifiable cult around the books that influenced them." Whether or not you buy into UFO research, particularly Vallée's especially tinfoil strain of non-extraterrestrial hypotheses ("I am a heretic among heretics," he is known to lament), this book is a fascinating cultural document. Before glasnost, the broad-reaching and colorful world of Soviet UFO research was completely isolated from the West, forced to depend on non-institutional research bodies, catalogued with a uniquely Russian strain of manic order, and often effectively shut down by the government or by prevailing cultural opinion. At this moment in 1990, however, ufologists were free to pontificate at will to Vallée, a Western scientist, about Tunguska explosion of 1908, the Voronezh incidents, the rampant UFO activity in the Perm region of Russia, and about the widespread Soviet technique of "biolocation," kind of biological-field dowsing -- all this for the first time. Before Vallée's trip to Moscow, no Soviet ufologists had ever compared notes with a Western scientist or researcher. I mean, imagine the mind-fuck that this represents, especially when someone from the West says to you, "yes, we have reports of alien abductions, too." This accidental control group created by Soviet isolation seems, at face value, like a solid corroboration that we are really in the midst of legitimate visitations. Vallée's speculations about the Soviet scene are intimate and fascinating. He often reflects on the abject cultural misery of the USSR, its inescapable sense of pervading gloom; he is also struck by the tenacity and vibrancy of its paranormal research. After a roundtable conference with Muscovite scientists, he notes, "the Soviets...still regard the future with the somewhat naïve passion of a Jules Verne or an H.G. Wells," an observation that resounds strongly when you consider the average Soviet witness' description of an extraterrestrial being: 10 feet tall, silver boots, three eyes. This, incidentally, is one of the most interesting aspects of the cross-cultural summit: that the Russians, unbeknownst to the West, have been experiencing the same kinds of crazy unexplainable phenomena as we have, forever, totally isolated from our singular conception of the extraterrestrial or paranormal as being necessarily "grey" or "little green man" in persuasion. The result is a manifestation of the unknown that is perhaps more fantastic than Vallée might have anticipated, and certainly as alien -- pun wholly intended -- to our worldview as these phenomena themselves. The big question, of course, remains unanswered. While the Soviet data is replete with well-documented sightings, none of them bear any resemblance to the Western data. Instead of saucers, we see glowing spheres; instead of almond-eyed gangly creatures, we encounter robots and headless giants. Does this mean that UFO phenomena are simply irrational experiences heavily filtered through our cultural conceptions? Are we even talking about the same thing? With so many varieties of manifestation, the UFO problem becomes almost semantic, especially in the case of this glasnost-fueled conference, for we lack a common language. I'm tempted to read this as a version of the kind of cultural catastrophe that usually results from the communication of two formerly isolated groups; with a lack of shared language, and the only common ground being a commitment to the fantastic and conspiratorial, the Soviet-Western ufology conference might have spelled a death knell to the whole movement. Vallée is more hopeful, however, and that is the eternal asset of the UFO movement: "These developments," he concludes, "give us hope that a fruitful, long-term dialogue might be opening at last between researchers in the Soviet Union and their Western counterparts...it is only through such dialogue that the UFO mystery will eventually be solved."

What's Going On With the Universe?

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:00:00 -0800

The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that smacks of thinly-veiled condescension. In recent years, however, the tides have changed, at least to the untrained eye of this untoward layperson. In November, a non-affiliated renegade physicist with a penchant for year-round surfing and Burning Man baffled the scientific community with a surprisingly cogent theory of everything: a testable hypothesis, which, refreshingly, does not require either highly complex mathematics, or any more than one dimension of time and three of space. It's based on the E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, generally considered to be the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics. Quoth the surfer in question, Garrett Lisi, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." A radically simple Theory Of Everything that could shelve once and for all the quivering postulations of String theorists? Strike one. This guy? Furthermore, this month, one of the most prestigious astronomical publications in the world, The Astrophysical Journal, will publish the research of Gerrit Verschuur, who claims that the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite images -- which, since 1992, have served as unfuckwithable empirical evidence of the Big Bang -- depict nearby hydrogen gas clouds in our own galaxy, rather than the structures of the early Universe they are thought to be. A massive paradigm shift that brings us back to square one as far as the origin of the Universe is concerned? Strike two. There's plenty of contenders vying for strike three. A recent, and much-misunderstood, paper by Laurence Krauss (author, incidentally, of The Physics of Star Trek) of Case Western Reserve University argued that since the Universe originated from a quantum state -- and hence is part of a highly illogical quantum system -- then it's possible that a "probability wave" of reality could be conked out by something as innocuous as an observation. Remember Schroedinger's unfortunate cat? In any case, Krauss' paper ever-so-lightly suggested that a 1998 observation of a supernova, through which scientists deduced the existence of dark matter, could have collapsed a web of probabilities stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, potentially shortening the lifespan of our very universe. But wait, isn't the Big Bang potentially bunk? Or maybe there's no quantum universe at all; maybe the universe is this glamorous, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern resounding with beautiful and complex symmetries. It's a mess: the quest for a unified front has only led to more and more chaos, illogical syllogisms, and mutually-exclusive theory sets. Meanwhile, astronomers are knee-deep in dark matter, dark energy, new planets, holes in the universe, and ancient textures in the sky. It seems as though string Theory era has opened the vibrating, 11-dimensional doors to a period of open speculation. We seem to be in the midst of a theoretical free-for-all, a mêlée of ideas, both hackneyed and abstract. Is the scientific establishment really evolving into a multifaceted, fractured, and wildly theoretical community? Are open-source electronic journals and the democratization of information in this self-navigating digital era rending the staid entitlement of science into shreds? Or is it simply the fault of the mainstream press, being more clued in to the hype potential of science than it once was, perhaps enticed by the exoticism of String Theory, the media-savvy of Brian Greene, or the throbbing pulse of the upcoming Mayan apocalypse? In his 2006 book, "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Particle Physics," mathematical physicist Peter Woit explains that "particle theory has a long history of being successfully pursued in a somewhat faddish manner...new ideas get a lot of attention, leading in a short period either to significant progress, or, more commonly, to abandonment as the community moves on to the next thing." Are these recent jabs at the gilded throne of particle physics, as Woit puts it, simply "faddish?" Perhaps string theory's wildly untestable nature has broken this pattern dramatically, thrusting us headlong into an age of uncertainty, an era of radically open scientific discourse, careening along the mandala-like vortices of cosmic shapes or emanating from an uncertain, perhaps quantum, past. Here's hoping, right?

Happy Birthday, Mr. Clarke!

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:12:29 -0800

HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY,
ARTHUR C. CLARKE! I'm personally indebted to Mr. Clarke for so many reasons: his profound optimism, particularly about our race as a unified system and our inevitable future contact with extraterrestrial life, has bolstered my ability to think globally; his unshakable commitment to the popularization of science and the dry elegance of his books have always left me echoing with dewy wonder. I pretty much consider the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when David Bowman proclaims, ""The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!" to be a seminal moment in my relationship with science fiction as an intellectual commitment, and as a genre. Happy Birthday, Arthur; may your own rendezvous with Rama not take place for many more years. Celebrate this day, Internauts. Learn something new about space today. Watch Arthur C. Clarke's musings on turning 90 (above), which he bookends with a startling quotation from Kipling: "If I have given you delight/ By aught that I have done,/ Let me lie quiet in that night/ Which shall be yours anon." After that, head over to the Sri Lankan Astronomical Association's special Clarke-Birthday-Blog and wish the great man some good tidings of your own!

UFO Maps

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:18:47 -0800

I'm surprised that I haven't come across this before: a Google-maps rendering of UFO sightings in the US, dynamically updated as-it-happens. Preliminary perusal seems to indicate that UFOs tend to stay away from the landlocked mountains, preferring to pop by the Pacific Northwest, the California coastline, and, in droves, the East Coast and the area immediately around the Great Lakes. For those of us who "believe" that even a fraction of these sightings may be the real deal, this map is an interesting asset and may tell us some valuable things about our visitors; for those of us who don't, this is a powerful illustration of human folly, and that's pretty compelling, too.

Evacuate Myspace Before It Recycles

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 13:10:14 -0800

Evacuating Myspace Before It Recycles from universe on Vimeo.

Heaven's Gate: The Interplanetary Internet

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:00:00 -0800

On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-approaching Hale-Bopp comet. In a very real sense, they did not believe themselves to be committing suicide; they merely saw themselves as abandoning their fallible physical "vehicles:" a radical extension of a commitment they had spent years developing while living in isolated compounds in Salt Lake City, Denver, and the Dallas Forth-Worth area, before moving to their final resting place in Southern California. Heaven's Gate is a fascinating group, a religious sect that defies our perceptions of cult-dom in strange and interesting ways. What intrigues me the most about them, however, aside from the controversy and mystique of the suicide, is their complicated relationship to technology. While we all remember the Nike sneakers, what most people don't know about these 38 devotees and their leader, Marshall Applewhite (known to them as "Bo" or "Do"), is that they sustained themselves, financially and socially, by making websites. From the early 1990s until their deaths, they ran a reasonably profitable web design company called Higher Source, churning out innocuous sites for organizations like the San Diego Polo Club. The Higher Source site (now-defunct, but available on Archive.org if you're feeling industrious) proclaimed -- and this should maybe have been a red "crazies" flag for potential clients -- that "individually and collectively, we have focused on outgrowing the artificial limitations this society has programmed all of us to accept in personal conduct and task efficiency...we can produce at a level of efficiency and quality unequalled in the computer industry." Even more interesting is that although the business was characterized by Heaven's Gate as state of the art, it was, by all accounts, far from cutting-edge. A technical communications specialist quoted in a 1997 CNN story on the subject put it this way: "They weren't very good Web designers. I don't know what kind of money they were making. They have white outlines on the edges of the text that kind of mooshes it against the background." When exactly they first became mixed up with computers is unknown, but it must have dated back some years, probably catalyzed by their fascination between emerging communication technologies and space travel. Furthermore, their love of computers became totally absorbed into their idiom and ideology, as well as the way they conceptualized their beliefs. Patricia Goerman's awesome MA thesis, "Heaven's Gate: A Sociological Perspective," delves into this issue in some detail. Goerman points out that in their writings, Heaven's Gate members "discuss their use of 'N.L. (Next Level) Base computer language,' as a way to express their 'higher level' of understanding of Biblical and other ideas as compared with the average human...they say that those who have the same 'computer program' or 'software' will interpret...statement[s] differently than the average human." It's not surprising that the burgeoning Internet technologies of the mid-1990s could have been so easily adaptable to this kind of cultic mysticism. After all, all great paradigm shifts usually engender some kind of religious sentiment or fervency, either in reactionary fear or evangelical embrace. The web explosion must have seemed like a great harbinger of change, as well as a perfectly suitable -- or alarming -- metaphor for New Age notions of connectivity, to anyone thinking of the big picture. It seems bitingly ironic that, while the media in the 1990's scoffed at Heaven's Gate's loony dreams of space travel and the Internet, their ideas aren't that far from the truth anymore. 10 years ago, extrapolating the web into the realm of space travel was the rhetoric of purple-shrouded cult members. Now, there is sheer muscle (and brains) behind the development of an interplanetary Internet -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSCS), which includes all the world's space agencies as well as 100 industrial heavy-hitters, and even Vinton Cerf, who invented the Earthbound Internet's TCP/IP protocols. Of course, there are some huge differences between the 1.0 Internet as Heaven's Gate knew it and the interplanetary Internet -- namely, in terms of its difficulties. On Earth, two computers connected to the Internet can only physically be a few thousand miles apart, tops. So, packets of data shooting along fiber-optic cables at 186,000 miles a second only take a paltry few fractions of a second to get from one computer to another. The delay is so infinitesimally small as to be negligible, no matter how much we complain about the download speed of our Office bittorrents. But when you factor in distances such as, say, the 38 million miles from Earth to Mars, that same little delay doesn't look so negligible anymore. At this point, we're talking several minutes or even hours for a radio signal to reach a receiving station, assuming the line-of-sight isn't blocked by another satellite, an errant meteor, or some floating space junk. In the foreseeable future, an Interplanetary 'net rigged from NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas to all kinds of microsatellites floating in constellations around the planets just won't be able to duplicate the real-time immediacy of the one we have on Earth. You may rebut, quite reasonably, "Why in the hell do we need the Internet on Mars? That is still a totally insane notion." That is as fundamental a question, however, as "Why do we need a space program?" and the answers are probably wildly relative to your stance on the issue. Still, one look at the Mars Pathfinder mission (which, coincidentally, was big news only a few months after the Rancho Santa Fe suicides) elucidates the technical need. When NASA sent the first rovers to Mars, they gave us a highly-anticipated, detailed look at a long-mysterious planet. However, data from the Pathfinder trickled back at an excruciating rate of about 300 bits per second -- about 200 times slower than even an average computer with decent Internet on Earth can transfer data. With the advent of interplanetary Internet protocols, however, researchers at JPL's Mars Network think the transfer rate could eventually get up to about 1 Megabyte (8,288,608 bits) per second, allowing us Earthbound lugs to take virtual trips to Mars and other salient spots in outer space. If only Applewhite and his crew had waited a few years, they might have been able to visit Hale Bopp without ditching their Earthly vehicles.

The Psychic Sasquatch

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:50:00 -0800

Occasionally, I day-trip from the borders of legitimate science and into the boundless holiday that is the esoteric. I don't know exactly why I take such pleasure in pseudo-science; perhaps it is to keep my work safe from those who might portend I am out of my league with the real stuff. The lush, seemingly benign woods of the Pacific Northwest abound with myths, quasi-tragic histories, tucked-away lichen, hallucinogenic mushrooms, endangered animals, and wild men. They also set an unwitting and shadowy stage, perhaps appropriately, for one of the great dramas of the esoteric: Bigfoot. With the appearance of a shaky 24 feet of filmstrip in 1967, Bigfoot stepped into the limelight, out from centuries of Native American myth, unsubstantiated yarns, and mysterious footprints. Ever since this footage -- the so-called "Patterson-Gimlin Film" -- the Bigfoot has fiercely entertained, spooked, and howled through popular consciousness, becoming as potent an icon of the region as the spotted owl -- or grunge music, for that matter. The Patterson-Gimlin film There are those, however, who take the beast very seriously. They claim that until the Patterson-Gimlin film is satisfactorily debunked, or the hundreds of other sightings they have under their belts reasonably explained, then they're going to keep conducting the earnest field work that is the backbone of organizations such as the BFRO (Bigfoot Research Organization). To these people, the mainstream conception of the Sasquatch as being folklore or farce is a source of great and indignant offense, and it is their modus operandi to prove all the rest of us wrong with diligent scientific research of their golden calf of a cryptid, the Bigfoot. To those who believe in him, the Bigfoot is a completely real, albeit elusive creature of unknown survival economy, native to the woods of Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and Western Canada. He is six and a half to eight feet tall, covered in reddish-brown or black hair, with large, human-like feet and a significantly foul odor. But this is not the beast I am interested in. No, there exists a stranger, even more profoundly conspiracist conception of the Bigfoot: the psychic Sasquatch, a paranormal, inter-dimensional creature. As you might imagine, this causes a huge rift within the already fractured Bigfoot (BF) community. Those who support the thesis of a paranormal Bigfoot are profoundly marginalized, barred from discourse, and generally scorned in much the same way that the non-Bigfoot community -- i.e. the scientific mainstream, popular consciousness, you know, normal people -- scoffs at the very existence of a hairy woodland ape. This begs the question, of course: can we imagine that an as-yet-unknown normality is scoffing at us? Above all, it's simply a question of perspective, of the tools and methodologies available to you. Can the normal be more normal? The crazy, crazier? Before we delve too deeply into the philosophical nuances raised by this divided community, we should perhaps discuss the psychic Sasquatch. There are several models, of course, but they all share some central precepts: the Bigfoot is of greater-than-human intelligence and endowed with an acute psychic ability. He is elusive, not because of his scarcity or well-documented ability to hide away in the woods: he is elusive because he has the capacity to dematerialize, to pass through wormholes from this dimension to any other, parallel dimension. Furthermore, and perhaps most outrageously, he is in cahoots with friendly extraterrestrials, or UFOs. The UFOs serve as scouts, protecting the interdimensional Bigfoot from leering human eyes. Furthermore, according to the telepathic field work conducted by one of the theory's most vocal proponents, Jack "Kewaunee" Lapseritis, the Bigfoot race was brought to Earth ("seeded") by their friends, the Star People, long before we ever came around. It's beyond amazing: to explain the belief in something as dubious and marginal as the Bigfoot, Lapseritis and his colleagues port in something even more highly-contested and generally laughed-off: UFOs. The evidence for these claims? Telepathic communications, alleged hundreds of joint Bigfoot-UFO sightings going back over a hundred years, and, surprisingly, theoretical physics. According to paranormal Bigfoot researcher Jon-Erik Beckjord, perhaps the most colorful character in the history of the Internet, the work of respected physicists like Dr. Michio Kachu and Albert Einstein can be used quite convincingly to explain the Bigfoot's tendency to slip from one dimension to another, with or without the help of his extra-terrestrial buddies. When scientists talk about the potential for long-distance space travel in our future, or when they discuss the remote possibility of alien life visiting Earth, they often throw around the concept of wormholes. A purely theoretical construct gleefully exploited in science-fiction films, a Schwarzschild wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical connection between widely separated regions of space-time. It's complicated: in 1962, John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable, and that it will pinch off instantly as soon as it forms, preventing even light from making it through. However, if we postulate that a Schwarzschild wormhole could be held open by a grip of exotic matter (another theoretical construct), then a traversable wormhole is possible, allowing faster-than-light travel through space-time. Theoretically, then, ships could cross great distances across universes in such a way. I hesitate to say UFOs because it instantly demotes me to a different level, but that's the idea. So, quoth Beckjord, "If UFOs can do this, why not people, missing ships and planes, and hairy humanoids?" Taking the concept to town, Beckjord proposes that there are thousands, even millions, of wormholes "twisting and crackling all over the Earth, sending and receiving, taking and returning, over and over." In this worldview, wormholes shuffle Bigfoots from one continent to another (which explains the existence of the Yeti, Yowie, Bunyip, Skunk Ape, and the Chinese Yeren), shoot people through time and space, account for the lost sock phenomenon, and have something to do with both orgasms and the Satori, or Zen state. Sasquatch "passing through" a wormhole I'm fascinated by how fervently the torch of "science" is burned by people whose position in relation to the scientific mainstream is way off the map. To people like Beckjord, particularly, science is an absolute, profound practice, one which is abused by those who wield its power most. It's incredible how even the most tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist will always return to the symbolic value of science, insisting that their ideas are scientifically proven, valid, theoretically plausible according to some incredibly advanced branch of physics of which they have no understanding. How did science garner this cultural position as the ultimate justifier of reality? What if science and the "paranormal" could sit side by side in the pantheon of ideas? After all, that prefix, "para," which has come to designate objects derivative of that denoted by the base word (and hence abnormal or defective: parody, paranoia), originally denoted, too, a notion of side-by-sideness (“at or to one side of, beside, side by side”) that we can still see in words like parallel and paragraph. Perhaps cryptozoology.com's primer on the Sasquatch put it best: "If we hope for mainstream scientists to keep an open mind, we must lead by example, and not waste time and energy that would be better spent searching for evidence fighting amongst ourselves. "

Interview: Oliver Sacks

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:00:10 -0800

Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals. His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental connection to all things musical, dallying in the experiences of rhythymically-inclined Parkinson's patients and virtuosic amnesiacs, to name a few. Thanks to the Willamette Week, and as a preface to his Portland lecture next week, I had a chance to chat with Dr. Sacks on the phone -- the result was a sincere, often suprising mish-mash of observations about iPods, pots and pans, and, of course, the fascinatingly complex relationship between our minds and music.