On My Bookshelf: The King of Infinite Space

When I was a senior in college, I took two upper level math courses to satisfy a degree requirement for General Science. I was in way over my head in Number Theory. But I survived. Two of us were enrolled in Math 226, otherwise known as Geometry.

Those two courses taught me how to think like a mathematician: take nothing for granted; prove everything; build an edifice by small and careful steps. If only I had been thinking like a mathematician before I took four semesters of calculus and statistics.

We did not study the historical (?) Euclid. We didn’t directly study his seminal work Elements, either. But this book by David Berlinski dips into the man (what we can deduce or guess from those who wrote about him) and about some of the elements of his work in mathematics.

This book gets off to a difficult start. It’s not written like most popular science books, though there are elements of personal interest from great mathematicians. The author tries, maybe a bit too hard, to be literary. I do like his prose. But he takes too long to say what he needs to say.

Dr Berlinski doesn’t say everything. He doesn’t distill all of Euclidean geometry into 156 pages. He spends a lot of ink on interesting things like analytical geometry and the parallel postulate. By Chapter IX he gets to the advent of non-Euclidean geometry–things like how lines and two-dimensinoal shapes behave on something like a sphere. The earth’s surface, for example.

So we come to a final question about the title. Is Euclid still king in a scientific culture that stands with one foot in the fantastic? Elements was a geometry textbook for more than two millennia, but no longer. Forget space; does Euclid have any authority in human time?

I’m probably not thinking like a mathematician any more. So this book was a bit difficult for me, though not in the concepts it presents. Can I recommend it? Sure: if you like geometry.

 

On My Bookshelf: Are We Being Watched?

I just finished Paul Murdin’s 2013 book, Are We Being Watched? The subtitle gives it away as a science book, not conspiracy theory: The Search for Life in the Cosmos.

An astronomer pens a book that amasses planetary science, geology, chemistry, history of science, and significantly, biology. Dr Murdin is an excellent writer, and except for a few small factual burps (like Jupiter’s moon Callisto being the size of the moon–it’s not) this is a very informative book. It succeeds for being an intelligent and readable work without dumbing it down. Though a reader’s science background will make it very digestible.

On the plus side, the author takes the reader through many sciences in exploring the possibility for life off Earth. His chapter summarizing the search for life on Mars is about the best treatment I’ve read of a subject I’m not sure I ever understood very well. Especially the question about the Viking landers: what the heck did they find in 1976?

Count me as a skeptic on the likelihood of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I’m a proud member of the Rare Earth club. Aliens are not watching us. I feel pretty solid on that. But I enjoyed this book because of a calm, reasoned, and thorough examination of the multiple scientific disciplines that modern astronomy brings together to address the question.

 

Who, Us?

Back in the days when she rescued rabbits, my wife and I used to joke that we had a Prey Floor (where we lived with the cats and dog) and the Predator Floor (where the bunnies lived on their way through or to better pastures).

Perhaps Gambit, right, would like to chow with his “brother” Pip, the guinea pig. It would be his instinct. His natural law. The way he was created by God.

I see the domestic cat is not having a good day on the internet, accused of billions of deaths. I would like to point out that it’s the

… free-ranging domestic cats (that) kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.

Cats are, after all, predators. They have not been domesticated for as long as, say, the wolf/dog. While human beings are indirectly responsible for Africa’s cats–their granary guard–killing birds and rodents worldwide, we are also responsible for the removal of many other predators from the environment. The overall human footprint on the neck of the planet is bad enough. We are stewards (for better or worse) of the environment, and we are responsible for our misuse of animals, including feral and neighborhood cats.

And the majority of small animal kill? Cats outnumber dogs by a two-to-one margin worldwide. They are the main two predators we humans keep as pets. Except for tropical fish. Of course cats are number one to blame for small animal kill. Do you think the family guinea pig, if let loose, will be able to expertly patrol our basement for the mice that sneak in through the dryer vent?

 

 

Antarctic Monasticism

Feeling a bit better today. But with howling winds pushing the falling and fallen snow, I don’t think I’ll be venturing out until much later today. They already closed the church office. Did I mention this was tabbed the worst blizzard since 1996, which happened to coincide with the day before Anita and I got married?

All of our windows are iced and snowed over. I was doing a lot of cooking last night–chicken soup and apple-cinnamon pan bread. I did manage to get a half-clear shot out the back door. But the rest of the kitchen windows are frozen fogged and whited out.

Astronomy Today has a magnificent image from orbit of the remote Antarctic station Concordia. The closest human beings to the French and Italian engineers and astronomers are the Russians at Vostok base, 350 miles away. Even the International Space Station doesn’t orbit that high.

The station has a blog, which is fascinating reading. In particular, Dr Alex Salam’s reflection on the privilege of serving in Antarctica struck me deeply. There is a deep monastic opportunity, it seems to me, in this remote wilderness.

It wasn’t until the last plane of the summer season left that the feeling of living on another planet fully hit home however. Concordia is extremely busy over the summer, full of hustle and bustle with planes arriving and people coming and going. Over the course of a couple of weeks around early February numbers begin to dwindle however, until eventually one day you find yourself huddled amongst a group of just twelve of you, struggling to keep track of the last plane as it gradually disappears into the desolate distance.

And then it really hits home: you’re own your own, no matter what. This is when the adventure really begins, the challenge of living in a small group in a confined space, the sensory and social monotony that gradually builds up over several months, having to deal with medical and technical emergencies autonomously, prolonged separation from family and friends with limited telecommunications, and the inevitable darkness.

The Jesuits, about the most hardcore retreatants out there, don’t do more than thirty days. Several months strikes me as a deeply monastic opportunity. There is work to do. I imagine that for scientific minds, the routines of menial tasks needed for survival are a challenge. But that feeling of being “on my own”–I get that every time I park the car at a monastery or retreat house. There is very much the sense that I have left a lot behind, and I’m heading to an intimate encounter in a way I’m not usually attuned. When our surroundings, our usual routines do not support us, there is little else left but reliance on God:

O God, you are my God—
it is you I seek!
For you my body yearns;
for you my soul thirsts,
In a land parched, lifeless,
and without water. (Psalm 63:2)

Dr Salam lists many of the aspects of “normal” life that I would probably describe as “usual” to our modern sensibilities:

But despite all the factors that make Concordia a difficult place to live in, there is an absence of some of the stressful situations present in ‘everyday’ life such as commuting, shopping, queues, bills, excessive choice, advertising and information overload, rules and regulations and so on. And although everyone feels some of the psychological and social stressors to a certain degree, some experience the absence of “normal” life very positively.

What I see in this reflection is the innate human longing that is unsatisfied by consumption and indulgence. Living and working in a community of a dozen people with the distractions stripped away.

Indeed, with time most people who have spent a winter at Concordia (and often Antarctica in general) feel many positive effects associated with the privilege of having experienced one of the planet’s most spectacularly vast and daunting environments, such as: a profound sense of accomplishment, increased personal and professional confidence, a better tolerance and adaptation to stress, a clearer vision of one’s personal needs, limits and ambitions and a deeper appreciation of personal freedoms and the natural environment.

This list would easily fit for the goals of monastic life.

But I know what I would look forward most to seeing …

But despite the effects the darkness can have on sleep, mood and cognitive performance, there is something inherently special about the Antarctic night. The heavens present a view that many stargazers can only ever dream of. You just have to try and catch a glimpse of the stars before your eyelashes freeze together! Seeing the station from a distance with the Milky Way towering far above it never failed to make me feel both awe inspired and simultaneously insignificant.

The believer can get a flavor of this even without looking at the stars. The interior life always beckons. And while there are often inner terrors and demons to battle, the encounter with God is no less wondrous …

I think of you upon my bed,
I remember you through the watches of the night
You indeed are my savior,
and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy. (Psalm 63:7-8)

 

Sandy From Space

A day’s worth of Atlantic coast meteorological menace in a thirty second video on Universe Today. Considering the 850-mile stretch of this storm, one can imagine the power. The cloud stretch over the inland, that must be the storm system riding in from the West.

I remember being on the fringes of Hurricane Agnes forty years ago. My uncle’s basement was flooded, but people to the south of us in Pennsylvania and in the southern counties of upstate NY were far worse for it.

 

Space Aquarium

I see the astronauts at the International Space Station are getting pets of sorts. More than pet fish, really. These little guys will help researchers determine the progress of bone and muscle loss in a microgravity (weightless) environment. That’s the one big issue that Mars mission thumpers don’t talk about a lot. Even though they insist the astronauts on long Earth-orbit missions exercise daily, nobody as yet has a handle on how to stop the human body from adapting to the sense of weightlessness one experiences off-planet.

These fish, Oryzias latipes, have already been taken into orbit on previous US shuttle missions and bred in space.

If it were me, I’d prefer a nice cat for a space station pet.

 

Planted In Two Worlds

I’ve been reading Brian Clegg’s book, Gravity: How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives. This isn’t a review of the book, which I’m not quite halfway through. I’d like to look at his treatment of aristotelianism as viewed by our more rational age. I’d like to expand on a few things that struck me, and apply them to how the Catholic Church approaches theology.

My thesis here is that Catholic theology struggles mightily with one foot in the rational world and one in the medieval recovery of Aristotle. It’s a sort of philosophical schizophrenia. For those serious about the realm of the mind it produces moments of grave disconnect, where time-honored traditions do not fare well under modern analysis. And in the pastoral realm, we are left with seemingly heartless decisions rendered in ways that foster alienation rather than union with God. And for those who control the intellectual output of the Church, it provides a convenient cover. We can be rational when it suits us. Or we can appeal to “tradition” as it has surfaced in the intellectual tradition.

For the ancient Greeks, what we accept today as science was a matter of the mind. Thinkers reflected upon the world around them. They sought understanding and meaning from reflection and acted, taught, and lived according to those principles. They did not always trust the senses. What one saw, heard, or felt could deceive. In other words, the human thinker came first, and the world was ordered in ways in which the human brain understood it.

According to Clegg, the whole notion of experimentation was alien to Aristotle and to those of his intellectual heritage. Men and women had different numbers of teeth in their mouths–this is one of the more interesting of the bits of knowledge attributed to Aristotle. It went largely unchallenged, and if you think it would be easy enough to just count the teeth in people’s mouths to contradict it, well, then you are a modernist as seen from the aristotelian camp. The concept that observation and analysis could be done to verify a thesis was totally foreign to them. Of course, if one’s eyes or ears could deceive, it would seem the human mind could do likewise. But that didn’t seem to place in the aristotelian tradition.

Galileo, of course, comes into the book as a person who disputes some of the basic scientific principles of the day. Heavy things fall faster than light things–this was a fact of aristotelian insistence. And our experience might bear this out, for there is a difference between a boulder being dropped on our foot and a pebble. The former might cause broken bones. The latter is brushed off, barely felt. More force is applied by a more massive object, but the modern view is that is caused not by greater speed on impact, but by more mass applied to our tender foot.

Astronaut David Scott demonstrated the principle on the moon in 1971. A falcon feather and a geological hammer fell to the lunar dust at the same speed. Of course, science had long reconciled the floating feather on Earth as being more due to air resistance than its relative lightness. The experiment attributed to Galileo is that two balls of different weights

Aristotle was recovered for the West by medieval theologians, rehabilitated, as it were by Thomas Aquinas and utilized to sharpen the Church’s expression of theology. Unfortunately, the angelic doctor also brought some of the philosophical fuzziness into theology. Even the great hymn Adoro Te Devote suggests:

Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur,
Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.
Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius;
Nil hoc verbo veritátis verius.

In plain English:

Sight, touch, taste are all deceived
In their judgment of you,
But hearing suffices firmly to believe.
I believe all that the Son of God has spoken;
There is nothing truer than this word of truth.

I don’t know why one sense suffices, and others do not. Or why one might think that a powerful intellect could not be self-deceived. But I have the modern perspective and experience of the biggest mind game: addiction. The compulsion to indulge in substances and behaviors can overcome our most sincere intention or expression of intelligence. Saint Paul knew it well:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7:15)

Modern rationalism has its own traps, but the idea of testing is not foreign to the Bible:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God (1 John 4:1a)

I’m not suggesting that any single approach is optimal. But there are some principles the Church misses, especially in the upper reaches of the hierarchy. I think the intellect can be deceived as easily as the senses. Our brains and everything that connects to them are fallible organs. So what hope do we have? The reality that we belong to a Body. A community is the best check on individuals who may be in danger of going astray. The widest possible input helps–something more easily possible today–if only we dare to leave out ideological ghettoes.

The Catholic hierarchy seems to inhabit neither worldview with any gusto. The approach to many moral issues seems to be based on the intellect, rather than on testing, analysis, and discernment. The approach to war, just or not, comes to mind. Wars may or may not be considered just, but many of the same evils emerge from all of them. Is there any urge to use one’s eyes, ears, and other senses to assess and test a theory which has stood for centuries, and does not appear to be contributing much, if anything, to alleviate human suffering or repairing the church’s moral leadership in the world. A more favored issue these days would involve gays and lesbians. If people are born and made homosexual, then perhaps there is something to be said for setting aside the possibly untrustworthy realm of the mind and balance discernment with what one can hear from the testimony of LGBT people and see in the value of their lives.

I do have hope that someday the Church will finish the procession over the bridge from pagan and medieval philosophy and use the full range of tools at its disposal. If sight can deceive, so can aristotelianism, or any other philosophy. We’re Catholics. We need it all. And we can use it.

 

Overpopulation

I see Catholic comboxes are heating up over another commencement speaker. At the Bench, Greg Kandra picks it up from LSN, which gives its readers contacts at DePaul University for the registration of complaints.

I’d love to sit down with Dr E.O. Wilson and have a chat about science. But failing that, I’d like to address believers and others in the commentariat here.

Hypothesis:

Human overpopulation is a truth. Scientists, believers, and others only disagree on where the border lies.

Your options:

1. About one square mile per person is optimal–enough room for everybody to get lost. World population: fifty million, give or take.
2. Today’s population of seven billion grows enough food to feed itself, thanks to the scientific advances in agriculture. Our real problems are political: distributing food and other resources so people can live and thrive.
3. If every person had an acre of land (is that about right, sustenance farmers?) the world would have 32 billion people, give or take.
4. If every person had a five-by-five foot piece of land to stand on, that takes us to fifty trillion human beings.

I’m not going to put it up in a poll–I’d like to see your responses a bit nuanced: between two and three, between three and four, leaning to three, less than one–stuff like that. Add also your theological and moral commentary on this. I’m most interested in hearing from people who think overpopulation warnings are overblown. I’m sure you would say that human being standing shoulder to shoulder in ten layers of floors (two to three quadrillion people) would be overpopulation. If human beings doubled their numbers every thirty years starting today we could achieve that in six centuries. What do you say?

 

Enterprise Over The Apple

Space shuttle Enterprise flies over New York City this morning. Good feature and images at Universe Today. This ship never flew in space; it was the first one built and served as a test vehicle for the program that followed.

 

On My Bookshelf: Astronomy Non-Fiction

Two short and enjoyable reads this past week. Last night I finished Alone in the Universe. John Gribbin takes the reader through a careful tour–in turn: the galaxy, the sun, the solar system, the Earth, the Cambrian Explosion, and human beings. A series of factors contribute to Dr Gribbin’s take that human beings are the only intelligent life form in the universe. Quite frankly, I agree. But I didn’t need this book to convince me.

The first five chapters deal with astronomy and they are absorbing. Chapters six and seven examine two momentous events: the explosion of life about 530 million years ago and the volcanic resurfacing of Venus around the same time. Dr Gribbin makes the case that the latter was the instigation for the onset of Snowball Earth. His theory is that a moon-sized object hit Venus, caused a worldwide volcanic resurfacing of that planet (the evidence of the resurfacing is not in doubt) but that the debris from that collision may have been enough to tip the entire planet Earth into an ice age. Eventually Earth’s own build-up of carbon dioxide and methane from our own volcanoes thawed the planet. Life bloomed as a result.

The blooming of life–of hard-shelled fossils–in undeniable. Dr Gribbin is going to need more than two pre-Cambrian events to show conclusively there is a connection between them. Earth has teetered on going Big Snowball earlier in its history. It would be interesting to nail down those earlier periods and see if there is a correlation to the infusion of dust into the inner solar system. It would be a darned difficult piece of scientific sleuthing.

Despite the weakness on paleontology, this is a good read. I’m convinced, as I was before, that there is no other life in the universe that matches human intelligence. Most critics of this book seem to latch on to the notion that somewhere out there, there’s somebody else. I would be happy if they found people. But I’m not banking on it.

In a similar vein I also enjoyed Dimitar Sasselov’s The Life of Super-Earths. This volume starts in the 1990′s, and chronicles briefly the discovery of planets outside the solar system, and the gradual fine-tuning of our discovery sieve to the point where we can identify planets larger than Earth, yet smaller than Neptune. Hence the term, super-earth.

Dr Sasselov has had a part in these astronomical discoveries of the past two decades, so that personal touch makes this book a bit more engaging. And like modern astronomers, he draws on many disciplines like cellular biology, geophysics, and chemistry to offer his readers a more complete canvas of this scientific frontier.

We will eventually find Earth-sized planets. They may well harbor life. I think it more likely they will be locales for very interesting chemistry and geology. That is still a good reason to explore them.

To the lay reader, each of these books is engaging and readable. Read them quick, because the rapid pace of science these days may render some of the details incorrect, or at best, incomplete in just a few years.

 

Spiders For Violins

What do you string players make of the thought of utilizing spider silk for violin strings? BBC news bit and sample audio here.

There is a species of spider known as “violin spiders,” (image, right) but Shigeyoshi Osaki used a different species, Nephila maculata or “golden orb-weavers” for his instrument.

Bees for candles. Silkworms for the occasional vestment. Now spiders for violins. What other invertebrates are put to the service of the arts of the Church’s liturgy?

 

On My Bookshelf: Endings

The night before my wife’s surgery, she caught me reading Chris Impey’s How It Ends: From You to the Universe. She was a little concerned, but it wasn’t about her. Honest.

Professor Impey’s third popular science (PopSci) book (I’ve not read the other two) combines musings on the end of things, mainly biological or astronomical. As for the first, some interesting stuff on the philosophy of death, actuarial tables, long-lived animals, DNA, and such. Did you know, for example, that if you live in Manhattan and decide to drive over to Jersey to buy a lottery ticket, you are seventeen times more likely to die in an auto accident getting there than you are to hit the jackpot?

You would think that an astronomer’s passion would be for astronomy, not biology, and the final two-thirds of the book, where he gets into his passion, is superior to the talk about how it ends for a human body. So I enjoyed the talk about asteroid hits, comet collisions, the death of the sun, moving the Earth to a safe distance from the red giant phase, and the final era of the universe.

I have a science background and most of the nonfiction I read is scientific, so I don’t really care for dumbed-down reading material. (I avoid things to the third-grade side of Scientific American or NatGeo.) So this book was good for the general public that it contained no serious mathemetical equations, and is a generally readable and fascinating account of “how it ends.”

A very enjoyable read earlier this week was Cosmic Butterflies: The Colorful Mysteries of Planetary Nebulae. Dr Kwok’s book has a confectionary shop full astronomical of eye-candy, especially from the various space telescopes out there. He combines the science of the end of stars with a good helping of history–how astronomers gradually came to understand these beautiful objects over decades and a few centuries of observation.

Planetary nebulae came to this name because many of them looked to similar to Uranus and other planets as viewed through a telescope. They are the outgassing of stars as they transition from the red giant phase to the white dwarf existence. Not only are they beautiful to behold, but they give clues to the chemistry of the universe, including how human beings got here and where many of the atoms of our bodies may have originated.

I can imagine this book being narrated while dozens of illustrative images catch attention. It’s easy enough to compare the pictures with the actual descriptions and explanations in the text. So while this could be just another coffee table book, the blending of intellectual probing into the history of astronomy makes for fascinating reading. Skeptics of science would do well to read this book just to get a glimpse of how the society of science really works.

My next read is about Antarctica. I’ll tell you about that in a few days. Meanwhile, Happy Winter.

 

Another Undersea Tunnel

I wonder what Governor Palin would think about this. Someday it might be possible to take a train from Boston to Glasgow via Asia.

 

BBC on BCE and CE

I find it hard to get as excited as some about the BBC’s decision to keep the numbers but adjust the lettering. L’Osservatore Romano, as quoted on CNS yesterday:

To deny the historically revolutionary importance of the coming of Christ on earth, which is also accepted by those who do not recognize him as the son of God, is an act of enormous foolishness.

Or have the Anno Domini apologists been punked? BBC’s Aaqil Ahmed:

Whilst attending the recording last Sunday some people asked me about a story that had made the headlines that day concerning the use of date systems BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The story, suggesting we had dropped AD (Anno Domini) and BC (Before Christ), was quite simply wrong. We have issued no editorial guidelines or instructions to suggest that anyone in the BBC should change the terms they use. The BBC, like most people, use BC and AD as standard terminology.

But we recognise that it is possible to use different terminology, and that some people do: that is what is reflected on our Religion website. Even though we told the newspaper this, they ran the story anyway.

Just for the record, for our religion and ethics programming on BBC television and radio we generally use AD and BC. It is a shame that people seeking to make mischief should cast a shadow over the wonderful celebration of our Christian religious heritage that is Songs of Praise.

You would think that the truth would settle things. But probably not. Not only does this story have legs, but more importantly, it has bile.

Which brings me to a more serious musing for the day. Do you think anything will ever supplant AD/CE in terms of numbering our years? Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series gives two dating systems, that of the Galactic Empire and later in the stories, that of the Foundation era. But those stories take place about fifty millennia into the author’s future. What sort of event, other than the obliteration of human civilization, would ever replace something as entrenched as dating time from the young childhood of the Lord?

 

Oil Billionaires Verify Climate Change

I like this.

After sixteen million measurements, a group of climate change skeptics has results that pretty much match what climatologists have been saying all along. This group claims it will have several times the raw data that other climatologists have had access to.

I wonder if the Koch brothers–the same guys who are backing the King of Wisconsin–think their $150K is well-spent. Chump change, I suppose. They’ll make it up in tax cuts.