Marching for science – and for culture – on April 22

In the last couple of months, much has been written about the upcoming March for Science to take place here in Atlanta and around the world on April 22. And a lot has been said about what makes science great. But, in my mind, not enough has yet been said about how science makes us great.

I am the executive director of the Atlanta Science Tavern, a grassroots public science forum organized on Meetup.com with over 6,200 members. We produce and promote science-related educational events and activities in the Atlanta area.

In the time that I have led the Science Tavern, the most prized compliment that I have received has been, “your group is one of the things that makes Atlanta a great place to live.” The reason that I like hearing this so much is that it implicitly recognizes that science, like art and music and theater, is an essential part of the cultural fabric of our wonderful city.

Now, I wouldn’t for a second downplay the amazing practical benefits that science has brought us.

• Vaccination, a resounding public health triumph, has saved hundreds of millions of lives and fought back the timeless scourge of commonplace childhood mortality.
• The physical sciences, with their mastery of light and matter, have given us the ability to process and communicate vast quantities of information in the blink of an eye, allowing us to form a web of human connection spanning the globe.
• Scientific investigation of the Earth and its precious atmosphere has made it possible for us to understand the role we play in altering our environment, providing us with guidance on what to do to safeguard the well-being of future generations.

But beyond these many marvelous useful things, science has also served to ennoble us. And it has done so by helping us to cultivate a sense of wonder about ourselves and the world around us.

• How did the universe grow from a microscopic knot in space-time fourteen billion years ago into the one we now observe, brimming with dark matter and dark energy?
• Did life on this planet originate, perhaps as Darwin speculated, in a warm little pond, and might we discover that it has arisen elsewhere in our solar system, perhaps beneath the surface of one of the icy moons of Jupiter or Saturn?
• How did we, around two hundred thousand years ago, come to be the clever, social primate species that we are today, one capable both of acts of heart-lifting compassion and of heart-breaking cruelty?
• Is it possible for us to explain how the workings of the tens of billions of neurons in the human brain give rise to our inner experience and even to the phenomenon of consciousness itself?

If you think that we can reap the practical benefits of science without the drive of pure, curiosity-driven research, think again; it is the timeless draw of these profound questions that sparked the scientific revolution four hundred years ago, and they are what continues to propel scientific advances of all types to this very day.

Looking at science in this way, namely as an integral part of our culture, helps make sense of much of what we see going on on the political scene. The same forces that are trying to undercut science also have the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in their crosshairs. Along the way, they intend to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Contrary to what our Philistine opponents believe, we do not live by bread alone – although some among them would deny even that to our schoolchildren. Our human spirit is nourished and elevated by painting and poetry, by music and dance, by theater and film, by philosophy and history, and, of course, by science.

This time around, though, it appears that we will not enjoy the opportunity to speak out as they come for each of us in turn; this time around, they are coming for us all in one fell swoop. So, as we march for science on Earth Day, we must also march for the arts and the humanities and for the libraries and the museums. We must march for all the strands in the glorious tapestry that we call culture. We must march for all these things that make us great.

Finding a Home at ScienceOnline

At the end of this month I'll be making my way to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend a conference called ScienceOnline2013, the seventh annual installment of an event that brings together "scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done." I must admit to being both intimidated and excited by the prospect of joining this illustrious group for the first time.

Although this isn't an enterprise that requires new clothes, I did wonder whether I might need to be equipped with a new title for the job. Once upon a time I considered myself a scientist, a physicist to be exact, but my efforts to put together a presentation on the recent Higgs boson discovery reminded me just how long ago that episode was in my career. Of course I am a blogger now - who isn't? - and I do blog about science, that is when I'm not blogging about movies and politics. I imagine myself being a science writer one of these days, but I'd feel more comfortable assuming that mantle once I had book under my belt. That's not going to happen anytime soon. Certainly not by January 30th.

So, echoing the confusion of an erstwhile vice-presidential candidate, I find myself asking the question, "who am I? And what am I doing here?" What is ScienceOnline about and why is it a fit for me?

Well, according to their website

ScienceOnline is a non-profit organization that facilitates conversations, community, and collaborations at the intersection of Science and the Web.

The intersection of Science and the Web? That's pretty much my home address.

You see, I am the Director of a group called the Atlanta Science Tavern, Atlanta's premier grassroots public science forum, organized on Meetup.com, with over 2,800 members. We produce or promote several science-related educational or cultural events each and every month and specialize in bringing research scientists and science writers to an audience of science enthusiasts who just can't get enough of the stuff, especially when food and drink are involved.

Our topics cover everything from The Manufacture of Glass in Ancient Egypt to Neutrino Astrophysics; from Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose to Global Climate Change Policy. Many of these talks have been captured as podcasts available free-of-charge from our iTunes library.

Founded in June of 2008 by my friends Carol Potter and Josh Gough, the Atlanta Science Tavern began life as a science cafe in the tradition of Cafe Scientifique. But their decision to use Meetup.com as an organizational tool rapidly transformed what were to be informal, small-group encounters with scientists over beer or coffee into large public science presentations over dinner at our home base, Manuel's Tavern, routinely drawing over 100 people on a Saturday night each month. This has been an entirely Internet-fueled phenomenon, with easy discovery on Meetup allowing us to mobilize a vast community of under-served science lovers.

In the last couple of years we have leveraged our Internet presence to promote events and activities hosted by other organizations and groups. This has led to a partnership with the Atlanta Botanical Garden, in which we help them to get the word out about their own summer science cafe series. Two years back we launched the very first Science Track at the Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the country. It was a fortuitous result of our featuring Holly Tucker and her book Blood Work there in 2011 that finds me attending ScienceOnline2013, thanks to Holly's encouragement. Our collective Science Tavern gig as contributors to Holly's history-blogging website Wonders & Marvels has given us a new way to extend our reach to an even wider audience on the Web.

The sky, it appears, is hardly a limit when it comes to expanding our program. Our Mars Landing Party the night of August 5-6, 2012, which included a five-speaker symposium streamed live around the world, attracted over 300 guests to the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute, including people who traveled hundreds of miles from neighboring states, to witness the landing of the Curiosity rover. It also attracted the attention of The New York Times and CNN.com. Closer to Earth, we are currently organizing another big public event, the first annual Darwin Day Dinner here and are working to have February 12, 2013 proclaimed Darwin Day in the City of Atlanta. It's a challenge not quite on a par with Curiosity's "seven minutes of terror," but still fraught with some suspense as of this writing.

So all said, although I'm still not exactly sure of the title I should adopt for this new enterprise - "science impresario" would be my dream - I am convinced that I belong at ScienceOnline. If that's where the intersection of Science and the Web is, then I'm there! It feels a lot like I'm going home.


Finding a Home at ScienceOnline by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://thoughtsarise.blogspot.com/2013/01/finding-home-at-scienceonline.html .

Model Darwin Day Proclamation for the City of Atlanta

This is a draft proposed proclamation for Darwin Day 2013 that will be presented for adoption by Mayor's Office of the City of Atlanta sometime in the next few weeks. I offer it here for comment and with the hope that it might serve as a model for similar proclamations.

The idea for a proclamation originated with Atlanta Science Tavern plans to commemorate Charles's birthday with a public celebration, the first that I know of here. Visiting the International Darwin Day Foundation website in order to register our event with their worldwide list, I saw that a proclamation might be a good way for us to extend our outreach and our impact. I decided that the maximum effect here would be achieved by a proclamation that emphasized the numerous profound, enduring benefits that have been realized as a result of Darwin's pioneering theory.

Updates will follow as the process of transforming this proposal into a real proclamation takes place. In its final form, if adopted, it will be presented with a list of supporting institutions and individuals from the Atlanta area. Please let me know if you would like to be included. Other feedback is welcome as well.

---

Draft Proposed Proclamation

City of Atlanta, Georgia

Office of the Mayor

Kasim Reed

WHEREAS, Atlanta is a great science city and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, stands as one of the great theories in the history of science; and

WHEREAS, Charles Darwin was born 203 years ago on February 12 in the year 1809, sharing that birth date with our great president Abraham Lincoln; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s teachers and educators at all levels of instruction rely on Darwin’s theory to communicate to their students the wondrous relatedness of all living things; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s internationally-recognized colleges and universities are guided by Darwin’s theory in their search for a better understanding of the origins of our own species and of others; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s world-class biotechnology industry employs Darwin’s theory to develop cutting-edge products and services that contribute to our local economy and benefit society as a whole; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s medical institutions and research centers turn to Darwin’s theory to help them determine how diseases arise and how they can be effectively prevented and treated in order to reduce human suffering and extend human life; and

WHEREAS, Atlanta’s first city-wide Science Festival, scheduled for March 22-29, 2014, will feature many of the accomplishments made possible by Darwin’s theory; and

WHEREAS, the Atlanta Science Tavern, Atlanta’s premier grassroots science forum, will be celebrating the occasion of Darwin’s birth with its first annual Darwin Day Dinner Symposium.

Therefore, I, Kasim Reed, Mayor of the City of Atlanta, do hereby declare that Tuesday, February 12, 2013 is

DARWIN DAY

in the City of Atlanta, in recognition of how this great man’s theory has been so successfully used by Atlanta’s teachers and scholars, researchers and healers to advance our understanding of the biological world and to improve the quality of life for people here and elsewhere.

Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools

This essay began as my contribution to a discussion on the Atlanta Science Tavern message board having to do with the topic of a recently announced meetup, The Christian Right's Assault on Public Education and the Science Curriculum, featuring Katherine Stewart, author of the book, The Good News Club. One of our members Deb spoke out about what she felt was the threat posed by the kind of close mindedness which would prevent including creationism, for example, in the public science classroom. What follows is an edited version of my response to her.

I wanted to add to this lively exchange by trying to focus the discussion to see if we can make some headway with the issue at hand - or at least what I believe to be the issue at hand - and that is the proper way to go about formulating the science curriculum for public primary and secondary schools.

Let’s begin by turning our attention to Deb’s concern about the price we pay by closing our minds to alternative points of view in science and elsewhere. In some respects I couldn’t agree more, open mindedness is a personal virtue, one that I aspire to in my own life. I hope that I can live up to Deb’s expectations for me!

Of course, our striving for open mindedness has to be tempered with what I would call discernment. Each day we have to entertain a myriad of choices, but ultimately we have to make final decisions, sometimes critical ones having to do with our own welfare or that of other people. Good judgement is the balancing act we perform that results from maintaining an open mind while relying on significant lessons we have learned about what sources of information and advice we can trust as we go about selecting between alternative courses of action.

In addition, I would agree with Deb that it is incumbent upon us to inculcate open mindedness in our children, and I do believe that the schools, both public and private, have an important role to play in this process. That said, schools are also a way for us confer upon our children the hard-won rewards of our experience, not only as individuals, but as a culture and as a civilization. To lay before them a set of options without offering them the benefit of our collective knowledge would be a disservice, perhaps even a crime.

Nowhere is this obligation clearer than in the K-12 science curriculum. That is because, unlike other other fields of human endeavor, after centuries of struggle, the scientific enterprise has answered fundamental questions about the nature of the world beyond any reasonable doubt. The confidence of these positions is embodied in what is called the scientific consensus. While acknowledging that scientific “truths” such as these are always provisional, we understand them to be of a different quality than competing opinions and so raise the bar as to what will be the foundational knowledge that we choose to transmit to young and growing minds.

To understand this better, I think that it is useful for us to consider another element of the science curriculum and that is the germ theory of disease. I ask that the participants in this discussion to test the validity of their approaches by considering how well they fare in this analogous context.

Louis Pasteur photographed
by Pierre Lamy Petit

The germ theory of disease, the idea that disease originates, at least in large part, as the result of infection by microbes was, like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, a triumph of 19th century science. This is not to say that it reached its current form then. Viruses were unknown to Louis Pasteur. Likewise, the injuries that can result from chronic exposure to, say, low-level radiation or pesticide residues were unanticipated by Pasteur. No doubt, much of the harm that befalls us is self-inflicted, indicative of bad “lifestyle choices” having to do with diet, for example or the use of addictive drugs and has nothing to do with germs.

Nonetheless, the germ theory has become enshrined as part of the scientific canon and recognized as the undisputed scientific consensus. More than a theoretical notion, Pasteur’s and Robert Koch's legacy has been the foundation for the development of medical therapies - everything from the practice of asepsis in hospitals, to childhood vaccinations to antibiotic drugs - that have saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Quartz (Rob Lavinsky / IRocks.com) 

Be that as it may, a controversy still swirls around the germ theory of disease, not in the scientific community, but in a variety of sectors of the public mind. Some of these challenges have to do with an understanding of the very origin of disease itself, with the blame laid not with bacteria and viruses but with such things as an imbalance of energy fields in our bodies or the misconfiguration of our spines. More commonly the controversies have to do with what constitutes effective treatment of disease, with homeopathy and crystal healing being offered notably as competing "alternative" therapies. There is even significant opposition from some quarters to vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure.

I want to emphasize that the question I am posing is not whether there is some documented basis to these competing claims - I am confident that the list of citations is endless - but whether they should be introduced into the public school curriculum to balance the teaching of the germ theory of disease.

Two-year old Rahima Banu of Bangladesh,
the last person infected with
naturally occurring Variola major, in 1975

Would we be derelict not to include our classroom discussions the presentation of homeopathy, crystal healing, chiropractic as effective alternatives to the treatment of human ailments, on a par with antibiotics and accepted surgical practice? Are we obligated to teach this controversy? Should we instruct our children in elementary school that they should be suspicious of the vaccinations that their family doctors give them, telling them that there are some people who say vaccines are not only ineffective but even dangerous?

Furthermore should the science curriculum in this regard be expanded to include a discussion of the “ultimate” cause of disease, causes that in some immaterial sense precede its origins in entirely natural processes?

Should students in a high school  biology class learn that disease might find metaphysical roots in the karmic balancing of accounts from our past-life transgressions? Should they be taught that cancer, for example, could be construed as the fruit our original sin and proof of our fundamentally corrupt nature? There are not an inconsiderable number of people, if the popularity of Oprah's book selections is any indication, who believe that the ailments that beset us, including those that torment the tiniest infants, emanate from our failure to maintain a positive attitude about ourselves and about the world around us. Should these points of view be included in our biology textbooks?

So, in closing this addition to the discussion, I ask for you to put the particulars of evolution debate aside and consider the analogous question about teaching a different scientific theory - with an open mind of course. I look forward to hearing whether you see the parallels as being applicable to the original debate and how concerns about “teaching the controversy” might apply here.


Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Science Fail

In this third post of a series which criticizes a recently proposed one-way mission to Mars, I address whether a kick-start colonization of Mars can be justified on scientific grounds.  My second post disputes whether such a colony is a cost-effective way to insure the survival of our species.  You can find the introduction to the series here.

Martian avalanche and debris falls captured
by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
in 2008

A manned base for scientific research?

Without a doubt the the possibility of life on Mars existing today or in its distant past, is a scientific question of the highest order, worthy in my opinion of the significant expenditure of our treasure, although not, carelessly, of our blood.

Accordingly, I find myself in agreement with Schulze-Makuch and Davies when they claim in their Journal of Cosmology paper in November,

a scientific facility on Mars might therefore be a unique opportunity to study an alien life form and a second evolutionary record, and to develop novel biotechnology therefrom.

I strongly disagree, though, with whether such a facility need be - or even should be - manned by human scientists, at least anytime soon.  Indeed, a case can be made that far more science could be gleaned at far less expense by factoring human participants out of the equation for any early Mars mission planning.

Robots everywhere, 24.65/7 instead?

In the past dozen years or so we have begun to enjoy the scientific fruits of extended human-robot collaborations, conducted using reconnaissance satellites orbiting Mars as well as stationary and roving laboratories on the surface of the planet. Employing these exquisitely engineered systems, we have made monumental discoveries concerning the geology and climate of Mars, at a fraction of the cost of our current human spaceflight budget. Given the expected advances in computational power (compounded by the fact that our best Martian efforts so far are representative only of the cutting edge technology of the late 1990s) one thing is certain and that is the future probes that we dispatch to explore Mars will be dramatically more capable than the ones we have sent there so far.

Artist's rendering of a Mars

Exploration Rover

One does not have to subscribe to Ray Kurzweil's predictions of an impending technological singularity to accept the likelihood that within the next several decades - a time frame consistent with the preliminary phase of any one-way mission plan - highly-mobile, environmentally-rugged, fully-autonomous, cognitively-advanced, robots will be available to walk on, roll across, fly over and tunnel into the surface of the Red Planet.  Indeed, a critical feature of the Schulze-Makuch and Davies one-way mission proposal is that robots, sharing at least some of these capabilities, would be put to work preparing a Mars base to welcome the first human arrivals.

With this in mind, it's hard to imagine how a human-centered research effort on Mars could begin to compete with that of an exclusively robot-based one. The latter places dozens, perhaps hundreds, of robot research assistants scouring the planet as technically adept geologists and meteorologists, laboring sol in and sol out, indifferent to its tenuous atmosphere and largely unaffected by its frigid temperatures, regularly conferring with human supervisors on Earth to evaluate recent finds and to identify the most promising new targets for investigation.

Wearing the NDX-1 (North Dakota) space suit,
a student uses a sample-gathering tool.

A human-oriented approach to Martian science would rely on a limited number of relatively vulnerable human beings, venturing outside their subsurface habitats, but never far from safe haven, challenged by hazardous terrain, encumbered by protective clothing and life-support equipment, and able to work outside their habitats or vehicles only for short periods of time and only under favorable conditions.

A MQ-9 Reaper flies above Creech AFB

during a local training mission

To the extent that these Martian colonists chose to employ robots to make forays into the Martian environment in their place, they become little more than very expensive substitutes for Earth-based counterparts that could supervise these very same robot assistants from a greater distance. One need look no further than the shift in the U.S. Air Force to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for reconnaissance and attack missions to appreciate the cost / effectiveness benefits of a division of labor between humans and robots in which (selected) humans are kept safely out of harm's way.

Bee Gees - "Stayin' Alive" video

Stayin' Alive

The fact of the matter is that humans, whether orbiting the Earth or living beneath the surface of Mars, although promoted as workers for the cause of science, must be preoccupied with one task, and that is, to put it simply, staying alive.  We are fragile - and precious - space and planetary cargo, and an extraordinary price must be paid to keep us fed, comfortable, safe and happy in dangerous environments.  Every kilogram of payload that is diverted for these purposes could better be put to use dedicated to the immediate scientific objectives of a mission or else eliminated from the flight manifest, thus permitting more efficient use of fuel and other valuable mission resources.

The well-intentioned, although strained, representation of astronauts as pioneering space scientists, used to garner support for the early space program, becomes an out-and-out fraud when human missions are now proposed that dramatically diminish the scientific return on our investment, especially in a day and age when so much more can be accomplished so much more cost-effectively and so much more safely by locating men and women away from the front lines of space exploration and, instead, leveraging our remarkable advances in robotic technology.

Part 4: One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail


One-Way Mission to Mars - Science Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Adventures in Quantum Tourism

This is the third in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Consciousness.

Cover of Anne Tyler's
"The Accidental Tourist"

Imagine yourself a young person - or an unworldly adult - about to embark on a first-ever trip abroad. You arrive by plane at your destination and are immediately overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place.

For example, the language you hear at the gate sounds less like human speech than like dogs barking. How could anyone understand what's being said?

The signs you see posted as you make your way down the concourse are inscrutable. It's not clear whether the symbols are letters or words, or whether the script is intended to be read right-to-left or top-to-bottom. It all looks so unnecessarily complicated.

Somehow you find your way to a shuttle bus and, as it departs for your hotel, you are alarmed to discover that everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road! Whose crazy idea was this dangerous scheme?

At the hotel, weary from your travel but wanting a bite to eat before you go settle down for a well-deserved nap, you decide to visit the restaurant off the lobby which, mercifully, has photos to accompany the utterly unintelligible text on its menu. Little consolation that, since not one of the items depicted is a dish recognizable to you. To make matters worse, when your meal is served, what appears to be the entrée is unexpectedly sweet and what appears to be the dessert is not sweet at all, but unexpectedly spicy. This is a gratuitously cruel reversal of the correct culinary order of things, as far as you are concerned.

Exhausted from dealing with this onslaught of the unfamiliar, you retire to your room, where, although sleep beckons, you lie awake struggling to come up with explanations for the disconcerting experiences of your day. You are convinced that if only you had the intellectual chops to think long enough and hard enough about the strange things you had seen and heard and read and tasted, then the reasons why they are the way they are would become clear. But struggle as you might, no realization emerges and you finally succumb to sleep, your last thought being, "I'll never understand this place, it makes no sense at all."

The Twice-Told Allegory of the Bewildered Traveler
The above tale is an allegory for the frustration - and sometimes despair - everyone feels when first introduced to the mysterious world of quantum physics. The story continues, of course, taking one of two divergent paths.

In the first variation, the traveler wakes and beats a hasty retreat back to the airport, where she catches the first flight home. There she regales friends, family and colleagues of the bizarre details of her misadventure and the absolute impossibility of living abroad.

With the second telling, the traveler, refreshed by her nap, pauses and then decides to explore a bit before considering whether to cut her trip short. (It seems like the prudent thing to do, since she has come so far.) Fortunately she makes the acquaintance of an expatriate, a fellow from her home country no less, who helps her to understand a useful phrase or two in the local language and to appreciate a couple of tasty offerings of the local cuisine.

Intrigued, she vows to extend her stay, even going so far as to purchase a bicycle which she, with some trepidation, learns to ride on the "wrong" side of the road. Feeling increasingly comfortable in her new environment, she contemplates the possibility of establishing a second home here, and laughs when she reminds herself that she still has no answer as to why this place is so strange, a once pressing question that no longer seems relevant at all.

The Fallacy of Extrapolation

Terra Incognita (BBC Archive)

There's a category of misguided reasoning that goes by the name "the fallacy of extrapolation". Typically it is used to describe the mistake that people make when they assume that a current trend will continue, unchanged, into the future. But it also is a good way to characterize an error that results from imagining that the rules that govern our everyday lives should be the same as those that apply to a novel situation, one for which we have no first-hand experience.

This is exactly the kind of mistake late-19th century physics made when initially confronted with the uncharted territories of the "very fast" (speeds close to that of light) and of the "very small" (distances on the scale of atoms and molecules). And it is the mistake that we all repeat when we are first exposed to the ideas of special relativity or of quantum mechanics, the theories used to describe those two unfamiliar realms.

But, like seasoned travelers, we can benefit from knowing that, if we are open-minded and patient, then the confusion and dissonance that we feel with the first encounter a strange new world will slowly dissipate, and that through acceptance and immersion we can come to enjoy a new home away from home.


Adventures in Quantum Tourism by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Does Anyone Understand Quantum Mechanics?

This is the second in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Human Consciousness.

Richard Feynman, Los
Alamos ID badge

Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, offered this somewhat discouraging claim in his book, The Character of Physical Law, "I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics."  Given that Feynman was not only a technical but also an intuitive master of the subject - the likes of which will seldom be seen again, I might add - it would be pointless for me to try to contradict him.  But I think it is reasonable to suggest that this oft-quoted statement might benefit from some clarification.

Certainly, as a practical endeavor, many, many thousands of scientists and engineers around the world today understand quantum mechanics.  They use it routinely in their work, whether designing computer circuits or predicting the outcome of the collisions of the protons that hurtle toward each other at near light speed at the intersections of the beam lines of the Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland.  Indeed, the related theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, of which Feynman was a pioneer, is, hands down, the most successful physical theory ever devised as far as the precision of its predictions is concerned.  It would be hard to beat.

Compact Muon Solenoid at
the LHC at CERN

Yet it comes as a surprise to lay people, who find themselves beguiled by the mystery of quantum physics, to learn only a fraction of physicists are troubled, at least professionally, with the philosophical questions that it raises.  The dictum. "shut up and calculate!" holds sway in laboratories and universities, with the meaning of the theory being no more and no less than its thoroughly demonstrated correctness and utility.

And this is where, to a certain extent, they part company with Feynman, whose discouraging words might more accurately - and perhaps more hopefully - be expressed as, "no one understands yet what quantum mechanics means."  The fact of the matter is that, after almost nine decades of earnest striving, there is no agreed upon interpretation of what quantum physics says about the very nature of the world it so successfully models.  Some have more currency than others, but none has proven so superior that it has vanquished its competitors.

In my opinion it is our failure to formulate a convincing interpretation that fuels the controversy that surrounds the question of quantum physics and consciousness which has motivated the discussion at hand.  The absence of a conclusive answer to the stubborn question of meaning has been an invitation for all contending interpretations of quantum mechanics, of whatever stripe, to enter the fray.

That said, I do think that the central concepts of quantum physics are in fact understandable by "ordinary" people, that is if they are willing to let go of preconceptions and to imagine themselves, instead, as inquisitive travelers to an unexplored country.  This will be the topic of the next post in this series.


Does Anyone Understand Quantum Mechanics? by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Quantum Physics and Consciousness - Why this Discussion?

This is the first in a series of informal posts to be used as background for the Atlanta Science Tavern discussion Quantum Physics and Human Consciousness.

Why this Discussion?
When a handful of science enthusiasts get together to share their thoughts on the "big" questions, the conversation often turns to the mysterious world of quantum physics. Indeed, in a cursory survey of the interests of members of the Science Tavern meetup, the subject ranks near the top of the list of stated science interests.

We are drawn to quantum physics for many reasons, but primarily because it tells us a fascinating and unexpected story, that the world as we experience it is an illusion, and that a deeper reality exists, full of marvels and wonders, accessible to those with the determination to look beyond mere appearance.

The Cave: An Adaption of
Plato's ;Allegory in Clay

In this regard quantum physics arrives as a concrete realization of Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the alluring prospect that knowledge can truly set us free. It also represents the last best hope for the existence of any kind of magic, a possibility that had been all but banished from consideration by the thoroughly deterministic program of classical physics that began with Newton and reached its apogee at the end of the 19th century. Likewise, the overthrow of determinism by quantum physics offers hope to some for a theory of free will compatible with our scientific understanding of the world.

"What the Bleep" movie
poster

It is not surprising that these intriguing ideas have found there way into popular culture. The treatment that motivated the discussion at hand is a movie from 2004, What the Bleep Do We Know?, which sparked a brief, but heated exchange, on our meetup website recently. As a result of the way it interprets the relationship between quantum mechanics and human consciousness, the film has become both a manifesto for adherents of so-called quantum mysticism and a target for derision by the scientific community at large.

Our purpose is to probe the origins of this controversy and to try to come to a common understanding about the physics that is at its core.

Two Questions in One
I should note in closing this introduction that the question of quantum physics and consciousness - I will refrain from using the somewhat parochial qualification "human" consciousness from here on - divides itself, not so neatly, into two.

The first has to do with metaphysics - in the strict sense of that word. Does a comprehensive theory of physics require consciousness as a fundamental feature? This is the quandary at the center of the What the Bleep dispute.

The second question has to do with the origin of consciousness and the role that quantum physics plays in the emergence of it as a physical phenomenon. In this case the question, on its face, is not so controversial; brains, at least from a materialistic perspective, are physical entities describable, ultimately, in quantum mechanical terms. There is, though, much active discussion and disagreement about the variety of schemes that have been proposed as possible answers.

The two questions are not entirely independent, but for the time being, I will focus on the first as this series continues.


Quantum Physics and Consciousness - Why this Discussion? by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.